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Journalism of Courage
The West Indies cricket team is not the force that it once was. However, even for a team perpetually plagued with “new lows”, the West Indies’ failure to even make it to this year’s World Cup is a low that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
“A World Cup without the West Indies is quite unimaginable. We have no more depth to hit,” Gordon Greenidge, former West Indian opener told PTI recently.
The team exited the World Cup qualifiers winning only three of the nine matches it played – against Nepal, the USA and Oman, among the weakest teams in the mix. It ended its campaign yesterday after a defeat to Sri Lanka.
This comes on the back of an embarrassing performance in last year’s T20 World Cup, where the West Indies lost to both Scotland and Ireland in the qualifying round to secure a premature exit from the marquee event. The West Indies, seen by many as a T20 powerhouse following their World Cup wins in 2012 and 2016, looked listless in the tournament.
How did things get this bad? Is there any hope for a revival? Or are we witnessing the demise of the West Indies cricket team?
Dominance and decline
Once upon a time, the West Indies was the best and most feared cricket team in the world. Between the mid 1970s all the way to the 1990s, the West Indies dominated cricket like no team in sports ever has, bringing a ragtag collection of islands in the Caribbean onto the world map.
“The West Indies brought a nation of cricket lovers, whose flag flew only from a pavilion roof, to its feet. Not for a tournament, not for a season or for five years, but for the best part of two decades.,” Simon Lister wrote in his award-winning book Fire in Babylon (2015), inspired by a 2010 documentary of the same name.
Between 1976 and 1986, the West Indies won 15 out of 17 test series. The team also became the first great limited-overs side in cricket, winning the first two cricket world cups in 1975 and 1979, before improbably losing the final in 1983. Between 1975 and 1987, the West Indies won an impressive 74 per cent of the one-day international matches it played.
The sheer improbability of such dominance perhaps always meant that the “golden age” would come to an end someday. But since the West Indies’ heyday ended, its precipitous slide has surprised even the biggest cynics.
Since 2000, the West Indies has played 217 test matches, winning just 48 and losing 115. In the same period, it has played 475 one-day internationals, winning 182 and losing 264 – winning a paltry 38 per cent of its games.
Conversely, as seen in CHART 1, since its heyday in the 1980s, the percentage of games lost by the West Indies’ has risen significantly.
“It has been a gradual decline. I’ve always said this predates this group of players,” Ian Bishop, commentator and former West Indies fast bowler, told ESPNCricinfo in an interview recently.
In fact, even a cursory look at the team’s performance over the decades will reveal just how systemic the issue is. This is not a case of a couple of generations of players without talent. Something ails West Indies cricket.
The most obvious culprit is the West Indies’ cricket economy. Simply put – there is not enough money going around. Moreover, for the collection of countries that comprise the West Indies, even envisioning a profitable cricket ecosystem is difficult, given the size of their populations, the state of their domestic economies, and the International Cricket Council’s current revenue sharing model.
This affects everything – from quality of coaching and infrastructure, to player satisfaction. Most importantly, it is a deterrent for gifted athletes from the Caribbean to pursue cricket as a career, and more specifically, pursue it as a career for the West Indies cricket team.
“Now, the young players are getting more attracted to T20 leagues. No blame on them as everyone looks around for security,” former West Indian pacer Joel Garner told PTI.
As Garner said, it is not that the West Indies’ has no cricketing talent. Even now, players such as Andre Russel, Sunil Narine and Shimron Hetmeyer are some of the biggest names in T20 franchise competitions. But for various reasons, they do not represent the national team anymore.
Notably, given the riches in today’s global T20 leagues, the decision to not play for the West Indies is a viable career option they have as professional cricketers. Today, a player like Andre Russel can get paid a lot more by playing in franchise T20 leagues across the world than by representing the West Indies.
“The cricketing landscape is very difficult right now with all the franchise tournaments coming into play. So there’s always going to be that draw and pull of your resources.,” Bishop said.
Moreover, as T20 leagues get increasingly entrenched and create their own talent pipelines from the Caribbean, the next generation of cricketers in the islands will have no incentive to play any format but T20s in order to make the best living from their skills. First class cricket, which is already underfunded and overlooked by the board, especially post-pandemic, will have no place in the cricket ecosystem of the West Indies. Nor will ODIs. Many see this as a major issue while developing well-rounded cricketers.
Why revival will be difficult
What is worrying for the West Indies is that the way things are progressing, chances of a revival seem dim. There are two main reasons behind this.
First, Cricket West Indies has been plagued with governance issues, with the individual countries’ boards constantly bickering and an extremely high rate of turnover in the administration. While some leadership groups have been better than others, cricket administration will always be a challenge, given the federated structure of the board.
Second, there are not only ever so many franchise leagues popping up around the world, there has also been a trend of certain ownership groups buying up teams across this landscape.
Take, for instance, Indiawin Sports Private Limited. The company’s marquee team, the Mumbai Indians, is based out of India. But it also owns teams in a number of other franchise competitions. MI Cape Town (South Africa), MI Emirates (the UAE) and MI New York (USA) are all teams owned by the Reliance subsidiary.
This creates a unique opportunity for ownership groups to extend contracts to players that will span across these leagues, providing a stable source of income for cricketers throughout the year. There have already been rumours of MI offering English speedster Joffra Archer a year-round contract, where he would need the franchise’s “permission” to play for England.
For the West Indies, this is not good news. The team which already struggles to keep hold of its talent will find it even harder to do so if players can literally opt in for a year-round job for a single franchise.
The West Indies’ success was always meant to be an aberration. The great West Indies’ teams (including its T20 World Cup winning squads) succeeded due to a combination of factors, including the emergence of a plethora of elite talent at the same time. The team’s present-day struggles simply put into perspective the enormity of their achievements.
