Time to clean house!

Mar 24, 2015 Sports

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By Sean Devers
Thankfully for West Indian fans their World Cup is over prematurely since for many, the heart could not take any more mauling from opposition, who reserved their record breaking performances for our beloved and once invincible

team.
The battering our bowlers took from South Africa and New Zealand almost brought tears to the eyes of some of their most die-hard supporters who collectively screamed ‘enough is enough’ at the top of their voices.
It is time for some house cleaning and drastic changes must be made urgently at all levels of West Indies cricket (on & off the field) to arrest what seems to be a terminal decline from the glory days of the 1980’s to early 90s.
A lot of changes have to be made at the Administrative level of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), also while the structure, infrastructure and the upgrading of facilities in the West Indies needs a drastic overhaul if we ever hope to reclaim our position at the pinnacle of Test Cricket as we once did under Clive Lloyd and Sir Vivian Richards. School cricket also needs to be revamped.
Lloyd and Richards were not only great leaders because of the strength of their teams but also because they led from the front consistently as players and were consummate professionals at a time when money was not the main motivating factor for the players.
But let’s start with the team which participated in the 2015 World Cup that Jason Holder, at 23, was given to Captain without any previous Captaincy experience at any level of Regional cricket.
Holder took over from Dwayne Bravo, one of the architects of the aborted tour to India, for the One-Day series in South Africa and lost 4-1 in the five-match series but acquitted himself fairly well, especially as a

player, in what must have been a pressure-filled World Cup for the youngest ever West Indies Captain.
His job would have been made harder since it appeared from watching the games on TV that Chris Gayle, Denish Ramdin and especially Darren Sammy seemed to forget that they were no longer the Captain and at various times during the tournament give the impression that they wanted to take over Holder’s role.
The young Bajan must have known that this World Cup would have virtually made or break him as Captain and possibly as player too.
However, the tournament reveled Holder’s mental strength and although his Captaincy was generally too defensive, he stood up adequately to the test. He contributed two fifties and was not too bad with the ball although he was one of only three bowlers in a World Cup game to concede over 100 runs.
Holder seems to be a fast learner and this experience has most likely made him a stronger person. My best memory of his Captaincy was when Sammy wanted to upstage him on the field and Holder, with the millions watching live and on TV, let Sammy know, in no uncertain manner, who was boss on the field.
If I were a selector, only Holder, Marlon Samuels, Jerome Taylor and Jonathon Carter would be certainties in the Test team to face England in a three-Test series starting on April 13 in Antigua.

I might seem overly dramatic and harsh on the other players but the senior players rarely suggested they were fully and passionately dedicated to West Indies cricket and their fans in the Caribbean, who suffered sleep deprivation to watch them play in the wee hours of the morning.
The batting especially was horribly inconsistent and many times demonstrated a lack of ‘match awareness’ and sometimes looked totally brainless. It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
This bunch of players are fairly experienced at this level but they have made the same mistakes repeatedly and apart from a T20 title in 2004, have failed to win any tournaments in over a decade.
So despite the talent in the team, the West Indies have been a failure at International level for close to 20 years and must be made to understand that it takes much more than talent and a few world class performances now and then, to be successful in International Sports.
I would make several changes in the team to face England and would give 40-year-old Shiv Chanderpaul the remaining five Tests for 2015 (3 vs Eng & 2 vs Aus) and then ask him to retire from Test Cricket with a formal Ceremony in recognition of his tremendous contribution to the West Indies Test since 1994 and for being the most capped West Indian Test Cricketer.
Those five matches should see him pass Brian Lara’s record of most Test runs by a West Indian and possible most tons in Tests. Chanderpaul needs another 278 runs and five more centuries to break Lara’s records.
I would select a core of about 25 young players and they will all be required to sign WICB retainer contracts. These players would be among the leading performers in the 2014/15 Regional First-Class season. The WICB should ask Caribbean people and the ICC to show patience if the West Indies don’t win for about a year or so, since it’s a team in the rebuilding stage. Even with the senior players, West Indies were not winning either and so this should not be too big a request of the fans.
Among the players I would pick to rebuild the Test team are Shiv Chanderpaul, Jason Holder, Marlon Samuels, Jerome Taylor, Kraigg Braithwaite, Jermaine Blackwood, Leon Johnson, Narsingh Deonarine, Assad Fudadin, Chadwick Walton, Chris Barnwell, Miguel Cummings, Veerasammy Permaul, Devendra Bishoo, Shai Hope, Shane Dowrich, Anthony Bramble, Jason Mohamed, Imran Khan, Jamal Warrican, Marquino Mindley, Carlos Braithwaite, Kemar Roach and Marlon Richards.
I would appoint Braithwaite as Test Skipper with Johnson as his deputy since although Johnson led Guyana to their first Regional First-Class title since 1998 and has demonstrated good leadership qualities, Braithwaite is a certainty in the Test team and Johnson should be allowed to concentrate on his batting at this time.
The WICB should have frank discussions with the Bravo siblings, Chris Gayle, Kieran Powell, Kieron Pollard, Adrian Barath and Sunil Narine about their intentions regarding playing for the West Indies and in what formats they would be available. Barath, Powell and Darren Bravo, could also be a part of the rebuilding plans for the Test Team.
The right attitude, which includes discipline, has to be inculcated at the U-15 and club level and that is one of the major problems in the West Indies Cricket system.
WICB Director of Cricket, Richard Pybus seems not too interested in the foundation of West Indies Cricket, which is the youth level.
When I played for Guyana U-19s in the late 1980s, the Regional U-19 three-day tournaments comprised of five matches with each team playing each other. The 2014 under-19 competition was reduced to three matches and I was amazed that Chairman of Selectors Clive Lloyd, expressed satisfaction with what he saw in Guyana during the Regional U-19 tournament. He added that he was encouraged that the future of West Indies Test cricket looked good from what he saw. The standard of the U-19 last year was one of the worse I have ever seen.
When I was selected in the National senior squad we played the Inter-County competition and then had five three-day trial matches to pick the Guyana team.
From youth level we would play County matches in every County, thus allowing the youngsters there to develop an interest in the sport at a young age. That format also afforded the players and Umpires an opportunity to experience the beauty of Guyana and learn about their Country.
These things don’t happen today and unless more two-innings Cricket matches are planned at every level and decentralized, we will remain in the doldrums at the Test level.

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