West Indies cricket in a spin

Tony Becca, ON THE BOUNDARY

The West Indies home series against Pakistan is on the way and like every home series, or like almost every series for a number of years now, it is the same old story: the West Indies Board, the players, and the Players' Association are quarrelling, and West Indies cricket, and the fans, are hurting.

The three important stakeholders in West Indies cricket have been quarrelling for a long time now, over money and over contracts, and this time, following the disappointment of the team's performance at the World Cup, it is over the announced plan, and the implementation of it, to look to the future, to the year 2015, and the omission of the senior players, most notably Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan, and Christopher Gayle.

The Players' Association is mad because although Ernest Hilaire and Otis Gibson, the CEO and the coach, spoke about indiscipline and lack of application, and Dinanath Ramnarine, president of WIPA, wanted to know how a team can drop their three most successful players, how can the West Indies team afford to do this?

Chanderpaul, Sarwan, and Gayle have scored 11, four, and 19 centuries, and averaged 41.60, 43.20, and 39.05 in one-day cricket and they have scored 22, 15, and 13 centuries and averaged 48.98, 41.73, and 41.65 in Test cricket which represent, by far, the most centuries and the best averages in the team in both forms of the game.

I have no problem with dropping players regardless of their performance if their attitude is not good, but although he sounded a warning before it was done, when it was done, when some nine players from the World Cup squad were left out of the squad for the first two one-day games against Pakistan, Hilaire said that the players were not dropped but were left out in a move to build a pool of players for the future.

"We stated clearly last year we were at the bottom, and we've been doing things a particular way for the last 15 years. It has brought us no success. We must do it differently. We must be brave, we must be bold," said Hilaire.

That tells me that the players were dropped.

When we lost the second one-day, Hilaire said, "I don't know that we can say that they are not excelling at the pace we want them to. The reality is we are targeting 2015 when we believe we should have a side which can compete to be the world champions."

That also tells me that Chanderpaul, Sarwan, Gayle and company were all dropped.

On top of that, despite what Hilaire claims, the players are hardly excelling at the pace we would like to see. Although the West Indies won the T20 match by seven runs, they lost all three one-day matches to date, one with eight wickets and 8.3 overs to spare, one by seven wickets and with two overs to spare, and one by three wickets and 4.5 overs to spare.

This by a side in which there are three players below age 25, at age 22, playing against a team which includes four players below the age of 21, one of them, a 19-year-old, with two one-day centuries under his belt, one of them in the second match of the current series.

consistent batsman

Regardless of how talented players may be, dropping players because of attitude is fine with me. Based on what the coach said during the World Cup, however, based on what the CEO said after the World Cup, and although they may be correct in dropping him for the one-day games at this stage of his career, when a player like Chanderpaul is dropped, from all kinds of cricket, something is wrong, and he is not taking it lying down.

Chanderpaul has been the most consistent batsman in West Indies cricket for a long, long time. He has been a dedicated servant of West Indies cricket, he answered the bell every time it was sounded, he answered it when others did not, and he even suffered the jeers of cricket fans when was forced into the captaincy when he was least suited for it.

Chanderpaul, in a letter to Hilaire, wants to know, from Hilaire himself, if his comments about indiscipline and lack of application were aimed at him.

Hilaire's turn around in relation to Gayle suggests that Gayle was not dropped, that he was injured at the time of selection, and that the selectors were waiting on his recovery.

Gayle has since made nonsense of Hilaire's explanation, claiming that what he (Hilaire) said was far from the truth, and Hilaire has since said, "I'm not going to respond. We can, dispel all that Chris said by releasing the letters and emails. But we should not do that."

Who is telling the truth?

I want to believe Hilaire but I cannot, at least not until he releases those letters and emails.

I want to believe Gayle but I cannot. I cannot forget his past transgressions, including the time he left Jamaica in a regional four-day final in Barbados to play in a privately arranged match, the time he showed up, as captain, a day or two before the first Test in England, and the time he said that he only accepted the West Indies captaincy after much pressure from the powers that be.

We, the people of the West Indies are tired of what is happening in West Indies cricket, we are fed up of the way club cricket is treated by the board. We are tired of what is happening in our first-class cricket, we are fed up with losing, we are tired of selecting second or third elevens and losing, we are fed up of re-cycling players who have and who do not have the necessary technique to be a success over and over again. We are tired of exposing young talent too early - of using Test cricket to develop young talent, and we are fed up with cricket administrators who put in a man as captain, as nice as he is, who cannot make the team - a man whose presence in the team leaves the team one short, either a batsman short, a bowler short, or a wicketkeeper short.

2015 target

Hilaire has given us a timeline, he has said, or he is hoping, that by 2015 we will be challenging the world, and he may be right.

The way we are going, however, bringing in one failure after another, and remembering that one nice shot through the covers does not make a century, bringing in a young cricketer who is still learning the game one after another, we will be worse off by the time 2015 comes around.

The failures will continue to fail, the young cricketers, most of them, will be disillusioned one by one because they have been promoted before they are ready, and while that is going on, while the team keeps losing, the fans stay further and further away from the game.

No one likes a loser.

Test cricket, one-day cricket is for the best. The best must represent the West Indies while they build replacements, hopefully world champions, in the schools, in the clubs, and in first-class cricket.