Poor communication has resulted in rank speculation

Apr 30, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The West Indies Cricket Board of Control (WICBC) took a decision to drop Roy Fredericks from the West Indies squad for the 1979 Cricket World Cup in England. Fredericks had turned out for the West Indies since 1968. He played in 59 test matches as a pugnacious left-handed batsman. He had played in the inaugural tournament four years earlier which he helped the West Indies to win.
After that tournament, he was still scoring runs for the West Indies but age was catching up with him. By the time the 1979 World Cup came around, he was 37.
The WICBC decided to invest in younger talent even though Fredericks was believed to still have a few more years of cricket in him. The WICBC opted to leave out Fredericks of the team for the 1979 World Cup.
They issued a statement thanking him for his services to West Indies cricket. They handled the situation delicately, at a time when communication was not like it is today.
Not many other players have been that fortunate to be thanked for their services. When Alvin Kallicharran was dropped from the West Indies team, he was extremely peeved. He left for apartheid South Africa because of that decision. For a long time, he had been the only cricketer playing international cricket who had never been dropped.
Alvin had had three bad Test series prior to being dropped. He lost form in 1980 and averaged below 30 in 13 tests he played that year. But what hurt him the most was that he felt that the captain, who had a role in picking the team, should have told him that he was dropped. The captain, however, could not have done that without breaching confidentiality rules.
Poor communication therefore has led to players who were dropped lashing out at others. And we are seeing that again with the decision of the Jamaica Tallawahs not to retain Chris Gayle in its Caribbean Premier League franchise.
Poor communication has led to rank conjecture. He is speculating as to why he is not being retained. Conspiracy theories are been peddled without a shred of supporting evidence.
Gayle is no doubt upset and has accused Ramnaresh Sarwan, the former West Indies middle order batsman, of being instrumental in the Tallawah’s decision to let him go. But he has produced no credible evidence, only saying that Sarwan is close to the owner of the Tallawahs. He also indicated that the former Guyanese and West Indian batsman had been interested in becoming the Head Coach of the Tallawahs.
If Gayle’s belief is factual, how does he explain that Sarwan did not pouch the Head Coach position, given his assumed closeness to the Tallawah’s owner. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, it appears as if Sarwan is being made a scapegoat.
Chris Gayle’s record is simply phenomenal. He has played more than 100 test matches and scored 7,214 runs at an average of 42.2 but only fifteen centuries. He has 10,480 runs in One Day Internationals at an average of 37.8. He is considered one of the great T20 batsmen of all time but his average is only 32.5. But in the Indian Premier League (IPL), he averages 41.1 per innings which is far superior to that of Virat Kholi.
Age catches up with all of us. Chris Gayle is going to be 41 later this year. At his age, he has to expect that the teams and franchises with which he is associated are going to be looking to a future without him.
In 2018, he found himself not being selected during the first day of the IPL auction. It was only at a last hour on the final day of the auction that he was snapped up by one of the teams. He has rewarded that team with a good performance in the IPL last year. His experience in that auction shows that teams which he previously played for are looking to the future.
The West Indies Cricket Team will also have to look to the future. They will have to make a decision as to whether they will go with him to the World Cup, slated for this year.
In the meantime, the Jamaica Tallawahs have made their choice. They have opted not to retain him after a disappointing 2019 tournament in which he underperformed. Last season, he scored only 243 runs in the CPL in 10 matches. Jamaica lost 8 of those 10 matches and finished at the bottom of the heap.
It was to be expected that, with such poor performance, changes would be inevitable in the Tallawah’s make-up. The management has issued a statement saying that the non-retention of Gayle was both a business and a cricketing decision. They have said that they will not say anything more on the matter.
Cricket is big business. The CPL is big business and even the best will have to expect to be chopped and changed in the interest of the franchise to which they belong. But, at least, as a business one should expect the franchises to do much better in communicating their decisions, as the WICBC was forty years ago with Roy Fredericks.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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