New Delhi: When composing his rallying cry to his favourite cricket team, the iconic Trinidadian calypso and soca artist David Rudder characterised the beloved West Indians as “bringing joy to each and every son and daughter”.
The year was 1988. Sir Vivian Richards was three years into his successful tenure as West Indies captain, having taken over from the icon Sir Clive Lloyd who built a legendary title winning side in his decade-long tenure.
Fast-forward to 2023, the Caribbean representative side is a source of frustration and disappointment to supporters. Not only has the men’s Test team failed to live up to the glory days of the 20th century, but the men’s white-ball setup has reached its lowest ebb in three straight tournaments, none worse than failing to qualify for the ODI World Cup this past week.
ThePrint looks at how and why the West Indies have reached an all-time low in world cricket.
The Failure
The anatomy of the West Indies’ failures at the World Cup Qualifiers in Zimbabwe this past week lay in the nature of their increasingly abject defeats to the Netherlands and Scotland, thoroughly outplayed and outthought by cricketing nations with fewer resources to draw talent from.
The losses can be put down to consistently lackadaisical fielding, head-scratching tactics and poor preparation in the lead-up, from Shai Hope’s inexperience as an ODI captain to Daren Sammy’s last minute appointment as the limited overs head coach in May.
The team will have two more consolation games to play, against Oman on Wednesday and Sri Lanka on Friday to regain some confidence and begin the rebuild for an upcoming all-formats bilateral series at home to face India.
The years since the West Indies’ 2016 T20 World Cup victory mark the first time in decades that the Test team is performing at a higher standard than the rock-bottom white-ball setup. But the problems in West Indies cricket run far deeper and require a more nuanced examination than simply pointing fingers at Sammy, Hope, or chief selector Desmond Haynes for not picking some of the IPL stars.
This consistent decline of the men’s side cannot just be blamed on the increasing popularity of other sports in the region such as basketball and football. Rather, the multifaceted challenges behind the West Indies’ protracted fall from grace lie in administration and governance, sponsorship and financing, and a broken player-board relationship, made worse by the changing landscape of globalised cricket.
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West Indies’ player availability issues
The most successful era for West Indies men’s cricket began with Sir Clive Lloyd’s ascendancy to captaincy in November 1974, as they recorded 37 wins and 14 losses out of a possible 86 Test matches until his retirement in January 1985, and reached three ODI World Cup finals, winning in 1975 and 1979.
However, even these glory days reflected the far greater challenges West Indies cricket would face in the future with financing and player relations. Much like today, the administration at the time could not compete with other lucrative opportunities like Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket or even the rebel tours to apartheid South Africa in the early 1980s, aside from annual county contracts in the English summer.
As such, seeking opportunities like the World Series was always a part of West Indian cricket culture, as was widely perceptions of poor treatment of star players by the West Indian board, according to Simon Lister’s book Fire in Babylon. “There was no great feeling that their players had been disloyal by signing for Packer. Those from the lower classes who did well for themselves usually got a slap in the back, not one on the face,” Lister writes.
Featuring Alvin Kallicharran and Sylvester Clarke among other backup players who felt disillusioned with the board, the rebel tours from 1982 to 1984 risked weakening the West Indies’ bench strength and domestic system as the tour’s participants were ostracised for engaging in “sportswashing” apartheid South Africa.
But the West Indies continued its winning record in Test cricket into the 1990s, and had respectable semifinal finishes in the 1987 and 1996 World Cups. However, the retirements of star players at the start of the decade would eventually have their longer term effect as other teams like Australia professionalised better. The team won 30 of its 81 tests in the 1990s, but the number of losses doubled to 28, compared to Lloyd’s tenure. Half of those defeats came in 1997, or later.
By the turn of the century, more breakdowns in player-board relations would come up — the team’s first tour to South Africa post-apartheid in 1998-99 was marred by a players’ revolt led by Brian Lara and Carl Hooper over payments and conditions between the cricket board and the players’ association. The tour went ahead, but South Africa whitewashed the West Indies 5-0.
Even as West Indies tasted momentary success by winning the 2004 Champions Trophy, disputes between the two parties came up again in 2005 primarily over the team’s sponsor, telecom Digicel, and individual players being sponsored by Digicel’s local rival, Cable & Wireless. The 2005 Sri Lanka tour was the first time an under-strength side played, and four years later, a greater number of West Indian players began strike over pay and contracts, in a boycott led by the Players’ Association.
By this time, the advent of T20 leagues such as the IPL made players’ negotiating powers stronger than ever. This, coupled with the importance of format specialisation, means the subsequent decade or so was beset with the best players not making themselves available for bilateral series outside of major tournaments. A lack of team chemistry and a lack of continuity for the coaching staff make up a recipe for disappointment.
Grassroots structure and financing
Even the fundamental issue of player-board relations is symptomatic of the broader challenges Caribbean cricket has faced since its inception — that at its core, the West Indies is a colonial era amalgamation of multiple, mostly island nations and their respective cricket boards.
The current incarnation of the centralised board, Cricket West Indies (CWI), is composed of six regional boards, each representing a single nation or a group of nations. Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica are each represented by their respective regional boards, while the Leeward Islands and Windward Islands form the remaining two regional boards, consisting of eight and four sub-regional boards respectively.
On a relative shoestring budget compared to other ICC Full Members, the logistics of getting these half-dozen regional boards on the same page given their own interests in an environment beset with corruption and malaise has confounded many an administrator, according to fast bowler-turned-commentator Ian Bishop.
Bishop played 43 Tests and 84 ODIs for the West Indies from 1988 to 1998, witnessing not only the tail-end of the golden era and the seeds of protracted decline but also the growing governance issues faced by the board. He has since carried that experience into his research as a globetrotting cricket commentator and analyst.
“You start in Guyana on the South American mainland and everything else is travelling by air, if you have to put a series on or bring a team together…there is one conglomerate but not in every island is there a regional sponsor so attracting finance for the administrators is difficult,” Bishop said during a Channel 7 broadcast of West Indies’ Test tour of Australia in 2022, which Australia won 2-0.
Barring a one-off by Seagram’s Royal Stag during their 2022 tour of India, the West Indies playing jerseys have not donned a regular sponsor since the expiration of resort company Sandals’ contract in 2021, thereby missing out on the kinds of lucrative deals enjoyed by bigger cricketing nations.
In Bishop’s eyes, the biggest victim of these financing issues is the state of infrastructure and cricket-specific facilities back home, with investment being an important part of the solution to getting West Indies cricket back to where it was under Lloyd’s tutelage.
“We’ve had some great (captains) but they need backing from the captains of industry and administration more than ever, because the insularity from territories has always prevailed…The governments in each territory have to get involved in strengthening school cricket and club cricket with the best coaches and develop techniques there. The boards will have to get local corporates more involved too,” Bishop added.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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