RESTART FROM SCRATCH

Whether the West Indies Test Team wins the final match against England or not in the four-Test series beginning today in Antigua we must take crucially needed decisions, some of them unpleasant, to seek to put us once more on the road to the summit of world cricket. These must include in addition to the removal of the entire West Indies Cricket Board of Control (WICB), the entering into immediate negotiations with the International Cricket Council (ICC) to allow for the West Indies’ withdrawal from Test and International One-day cricket for at least one calendar year. The Region must use this grace period, this sabbatical, to start from scratch, to regroup, to do some serious introspection to see where the WICB and the team went wrong over the past decade or so, and determine what is necessary to effect a cricket renaissance.

If in the 1920s, the 1950s and again in the 1970s and 1980s we knew success it was not merely because we hungered after it, but because we had pools of talent from the several English-speaking islands, a drive to succeed and the discipline and commitment we accepted as necessary to mould a team that would aim at and reach the mountaintop. We had George Headley, Frank Worrell, George Challenor, Jeffrey Stollmeyer, Clifford Roach, Mannie Martindale, Rohan Kanhai, Roy Gilchrist, Derek Sealy, Alfred Valentine, Sonny Ramadhin, Robert Christiani, Herman Griffith, John Goddard, Jackie Grant, Garfield Sobers, Collie Smith, Clive Lloyd, Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Vivian Richards, Malcolm Marshall and the whole lot of them. But above all we had commitment, discipline and in the earlier days, the desire as colonials to prove that we were just as good as the English and the Australians, and dared to think that we could be and were better.

Today, the pool of talent and the nurseries that spawned many of them — Combermere High School, Queen’s Royal College, St Mary’s College, Harrison College, the cricket leagues, the inter-island cricket, the primary schools, and the scores of makeshift cricket grounds, many of them rural and urban backyards have, figuratively speaking, dried up. The annual intercolonial college cricket matches between Harrison College of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago’s Queen’s Royal College and which would later include Lodge School and much later Combermere, both of Barbados, had helped. So, too, had the visits of teams from England. But even as the pools of talent contracted in the West Indies, the English, the Australians, Indians, South Africans were using technology to help them defeat each other and at the same time dethrone the West Indies. They used videos to help them determine and study the weaknesses and strengths of their own players and those of opposing Test and One-Day sides, even as we revelled in natural ability.

There are still reservoirs of talent in rural areas, but without needed exposure to technology, there is not enough to propel them into world beating sides. Meanwhile, in the urban and suburban areas many of the young have drifted into computers, CDs and an undersandable and increasing focus on the academic. Millions of dollars, whether Barbados, TT or Eastern Caribbean, have been made by the West Indies Cricket Board of Control, yet not enough has been ploughed back into technology and the counselling and motivating of our players. In turn, cricket planning has fallen below that of football, an area in which friendly matches have been arranged with top or near the top teams to allow players the opportunity to hone their skills.

In addition there is the chance to observe first hand and profit from the on-the-field discipline which went into the fashioning of these teams. It was in Antigua that Brian Lara, captain of the West Indies Test team, made his record breaking score, only recently bettered. While this may prove a motivating factor in the game, it will be largely one of sentiment. What the West Indies needs to effect a long overdue cricket rebirth, however, is not sentiment, but acceptance of the hard reality that technology, discipline, commitment and hunger are the ingredients for success. Let the West Indies take a one-year sabbatical, start again from scratch, utilising all the benefits of technology, and becoming hungry, lean and trim again.