Tony Cozier

The US$62,500 winners’ pay day in the current Caribbean Twenty20 – even the overall pot of US$125,000 – is mere pocket change to the real megabucks of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Australia’s Big Bash and other such biff-bang extravaganzas that have sprung up in every country since introduced in England in 2004.

At the end of another particularly bad week, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) issued a statement reiterating that it will “continue with its programme for the restructuring of West Indies cricket and will pursue through all available channels the arrangements that are necessary for the progress of cricket in the territories and the region.”

After yet another year of habitual turbulence, West Indies cricket starts 2012 with an issue that is potentially more damaging than any of the several others responsible for the current depressed state of the game in the region.

Not for the first time, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) finds itself alienating a large and significant segment of its public.

The president and directors of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) are, no doubt, closely following developments down under, in their Australian counterpart, Cricket Australia.

As popular, Caribbean and appropriate as it was at the time, David Rudder’s converted anthem “Rally Round the West Indies” is wearing a little thin for cricket supporters despairing over whether there will ever be a revival.

Notwithstanding the results, there are hopeful signs that the long process of building a truly competitive West Indies team is gradually taking shape.

All’s well that ends well, even if conditionally in the case of the West Indies series in Bangladesh.

As humiliating as they were – and they don’t come more humiliating than all-out 61 in an ODI and desperately hanging on for a draw in a three-day Test against Bangladesh – recent events in Chittagoing were not exactly surprising.

They are three young tyros, all from Trinidad and Tobago but all with contrasting physiques, styles and places in the order, who immediately excited optimism that they would be the future of West Indies batting.

Just as too much can be made of the West Indies’ successive ODI wins on Thursday and yesterday in Dhaka, it is impossible to downgrade them, as they inevitably and widely will be, as “only” over Bangladesh.

Unless the quote was lost in translation in the Reuters transmission from Dhaka, neither the question at the media briefing on the West Indies’ team arrival in Bangladesh or Ottis Gibson’s answer was surprising.

From London to Dubai to Hyderabad and Bangaluru, every characteristic of West Indies cricket was crammed into the past 10 days.

There was the good and the bad during the week for West Indies cricket desperate to show that its present, and future, is not as bleak as it seems.

It was a rare occasion for West Indies cricket to be jubilant.

As England have not so much leap-frogged as kangaroo-hopped their way to the No.1 position in the International Cricket Council (ICC) Test rankings, the inevitable question arises.

As one who has written as many words to fill the public library on behalf of the West Indies Players Association (WIPA), Dinanath Ramnarine’s comment last week suggested that the penny had finally dropped.

Something strange happened in Dominica last weekend. For each of the last three days of a Test match the West Indies had absolutely no hope of winning and every chance of losing, Windsor Park, the impressive modern stadium in the capital, Roseau, increasingly filled to near its 10,000 capacity.

Kumar Sangakara, that most erudite of modern cricketers, chose as his topic for the annual MCC Cowdrey lecture at Lord’s last week “the spirit of Sri Lanka’s Cricket”.

While Chris Gayle, not without reason, tries to understand why he still remains basically debarred from selection, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Marlon Samuels, two other batsmen of similar vintage who have confronted different troubles of their own, have been battling to re-establish themselves in the Test team.