Young WI cricketers have promising futures if they are handled properly

Dear Editor,

The young West Indians, especially Chase and Holder, can be proud of themselves. If they had not sent in the opposition in the third Test they may well have won the series. The WICB should be ashamed of itself. The youngsters are talented cricketers with promising futures if they are handled properly. Fortunately, those futures have been made more promising by decisions being made on high that would recognize the wrongheadedness of thoughtless international scheduling. The conflicts between big domestic twenty over cricket and regular international cricket will end as of 2018, so Hetmyer, Joseph, Hope and other promising youngsters will not be asked to reject offers that could secure their financial futures, in order to remain eligible to represent the region.

If offered they would not reject those contracts, just as Sammy, Holder and Carlos Brathwaite did not, although it was unreasonably expected that those latter young men would demonstrate, by rejecting such offers, how unpatriotic their immediate predecessors were.

The West Indies have been one of the most important cricket regions since the nineteen thirties, so reasonable observers would wonder why in this series the two most senior Pakistani players Ul Haq and Younus Khan had played a total of 192 Test matches between them while the two senior West Indians had played 60 such matches between them. I do not believe the answer to that question is to be found solely in the peculiar legal structure of the WICB. The answer is to be found in the struggles between West Indian cricket administrators in the twenty-first century and what I can best describe as the senior cricketers in the region, struggles that almost always resulted in victories for the administrators in the form of banishment for the senior players. The ultimate result of this history is that the West Indies team recently has not been a blend of youth and experience. Experienced cricketers in the West Indies are all personae non gratae. In fact, they are even worse in that it is feared they would, in some way, taint the younger players.

There could have been about three senior players in this squad who would have made it a much better outfit. So, while we wait for changes to the legal structure of the WICB Jimmy Adams must insist that the ‘process’ by which we change selection policies must not last as long as the one used to introduce the destructive policies. It would be a good idea for the people responsible for the game in the region to do some self-examination about their tendency to place the perceived interests of the WICB ahead of the interest of cricket in the region. The cause of the consistent mistreatment of our best cricketers is likely found in that attitude of mind. Not much will change if their attitudes are not changed.

Yours faithfully,

Romain Pitt