Submitted by Pachamama
We recall well, between sleep and wake, nightmares of the slaughter of our teams, by the great Australians of the 60’s and 70’s. But this New Zealand team of 2013 is the opposite of the Australians, and yet, the expectation of capitulation remains our constant companion, in this battlefield of dreams, especially at this time of the year.
Last test match the West Indies Cricket Team succumbed for the umpteenth time, over the last two decades, to a less than viable opposition. This cultural rot will only stop when we properly locate its causation firmly in the laps of the administration of the West Indies Cricket Board (of Control) (WICB) and take concerted actions to excise the underlying cancer of this prolonged and institutionalized failure.
Since the coup that ended the ‘Age of Dominance’ the cricket establishment in the Caribbean has not produced one single player worthy of that epoch. What we have had is the constant recycling of average pretenders totally removed from the mind set of Worrell, Lloyd and Richards. The warrior mentality has been stripped from them, by executive design. The coup plotters of 1991 and their descendants continue to destroy West Indies cricket at all levels. So the largesse of team management could be directed to a Richie Richardson, the instrument of the plot which relocated effective power from players to administration.
Back then, we wonder why our players had to spend this time of year in far off places, way down under. We wondered why their families were not with them. But now we have a bunch of ordinary folk who are to be brought home for the holidays, what irony! A set of people who ‘lack courage’, badly led, on and off the field. Players, when you look into their eyes a deep vacuousness is to confront our enemies. But they are the gentlemanly types, they say, and exhibit all the behaviours which the elites in West Indies cricket like to see. What a bunch of female rabbits, on the Boards, no pun intended.
We have a captain whose only claims to fame is as the first Saint Lucian to lead the West Indies. This is our inheritance from Julian Hunte, himself a Saint Lucian. For Darren Sammy can neither bat, bowl nor field to the level where his place as a team member never comes into question. Thanks to Hunte, mediocrity in West Indies cricket has reached a normalization where Caribbean people are now use to being beaten up by cricketing infidels and a compliant administration remains unresponsive, insensitive to our pain. Still, we do not present Sammy as the proverbial lamb to be sacrificed on an altar of failure as constructed by a headless Muirhead, the new president.
Current players are supported by all kinds of high performance centres (HPC), comparatively better reward systems, modern training, university faculty, diet and a greater voice in the number and kinds of matches to be played, but yet, mediocrity continues apace. No pun intended. Because there is no real pace in truth. There are some people who take a long run but always ‘brecking down’ or mek you wonder whether they are bowling on the same pitch as the opposition speedsters. Our batters are no different. The opposition can be guaranteed a number of catches going down.
It is a team of 14 to 16 players and a travelling management team of another NINE. This smacks of some sort of bureaucratic skulduggery. Or could it be the dysfunction of a regional administration so caught up in its own internal politics that it lacks the sensibilities to see the lopsidedness of this management to player ratio. Could this excessive ‘management’ be informed by the mindset which brought Sammy to the captaincy? We are talking about the relative power of patronage networks within the WICB(C). There are no set of circumstances where this could be justified, given our dimensions for resource allocation!
The members of the extended Board, people like Joel Garner, Hilary Beckles, the president and the gravy train of representatives from regional Boards seem more interested in imposing monarchist cultural norms on players than destroying are common enemies, pretending that they are interested in shaping young people. So you will hear Beckles telling Kirk Edwards how he (Edwards) should dress when not playing cricket. As if he (Beckles) is in a position to dictate personal choices of others, what trivia! Or his unwarranted traducing of the reputation of Christopher Gayle. The coup of 1991 continues to use these cricketing satrapies to extend our political defeat in the only real cultural war we have ever won. Until we can get these pimping administrators from around our cricket the success of former years will never return.
Leave a Reply to Sid BoyceCancel reply