As West Indies cricket reels again from yet another debacle on the field, the clamours are naturally out again for the sacking of the present West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and for the restructuring of the body governing the sport. While I have been one of the critics of the WICB (I even wrote a song suggesting they ‘Take A Rest’), and the many complaints are justified (the latest coming from Michael Holding and Dwayne Bravo), there are a host of other factors behind this decline in the sport we’re seeing, and we have to treat those matters as part of the problem. If we believe that simply replacing or restructuring the current Board will put everything right in our cricket, we are dreaming.
For one, we don’t have the coaching and instruction apparatus, from school level upwards, that existed in the colonial days. With the coming of independence, and each country struggling to develop an individual economy, that system of training and ground maintenance gradually declined from lack of funding, as did inter-island and intercolonial matches of that earlier time. Our facilities for cricket today, generally, rank way below that of the countries we are hoping to beat, and as this is being written Dwayne Bravo, one of our finest cricketers and a former West Indies captain, is pointing to this as almost a “first step” repair. South Africa, at last report, had more than 100 cricket grounds of first-class if not Test standard; that’s just one country. How many does the entire Caribbean have? A dozen? How can we expect to produce world-class cricketers from low-class facilities? Bravo says we lack even proper nets.
Also, at the first-class level we are no longer benefiting from the system that allowed our players to be contracted to clubs in English county cricket where they learned their craft in the varying English conditions. Many of our cricket stars in the glory days, point to that English experience as a crucible that made them better players, as well more mature and disciplined, than would have otherwise been the case. It is a loss that we cannot measure precisely, but we can see it in the low technical level in some of the young players achieving national selection.
