The recent tepid performance by the West Indies cricket team touring India has triggered yet another barrage of media outcries about our place in the sport that leaves us far removed from the world champions we once were. Inevitably, part of the outrage contains expert speculation on the reasons for the decline and some suggestions, as well, for a possible fix.
This is now an old debate. It has been coming before us for what seems like ages so that what is being said in the current India incarnation of it has been said before – often in almost identical wording – but before we admit to being “at our wits’ end” on the matter, as one local editorial put it, it might help to consider some of the aspects involved in the West Indies cricket story.
One factor is that the makeup of the very West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) running our cricket is a conglomerate of nations, cobbled together from colonial times, to create a sports entity. It is an anomaly in international sport. The WICB is not one nation – it is many – and in keeping with our region’s post-independence history, where all of these
