THE West Indies Cricket team has just wrapped another test series and predictably was badly beaten by India.

The first test ended with the West Indies suffering their heaviest Test defeat against India, by an innings and 272 runs. It took India under 100 overs to bowl them out twice in their third straight three-day defeat in India. Fourteen of the 20 wickets fell in two sessions and a bit on the third day. In the second test India beat the West Indies by 10 wickets to clinch a 2-0 clean sweep of the series. Umesh Yadav added four more wickets to the six he had in the first innings, thus finishing his first 10-wicket haul in Test cricket. His performance earned him a Man of the Match award. West Indies folded for a measly 127 after making 311 in their first innings, leaving India with 72 runs to chase.

Some will ask, what’s new? Since our surrender of the unofficial world title to Australia in 1995, the West Indies have struggled to put together a winning formula. It’s been a long dismal period for our cricket inside and beyond the boundary. We seemed to have tried everything to stem the tide, but the problems have only multiplied. There have been moments when our boys seemed to have turned the corner only to swiftly return to the old losing ways.

We have not been short of analysis and recommendations. Blame has been cast around in reckless abundance and in the process many careers have been destroyed. Many have blamed the administrators, but while there is much to be said of their arrogance and incompetence, their conduct can hardly be the sum-total of our continued decline. Others have blamed the cricketers. Again, while our so-called stars have often showed that they lack the necessary commitment to the larger society, a prerequisite for success in the past, it would be inaccurate to lay the responsibility for our inability to win squarely at their feet.
The truth is, our performance on the cricket field is directly and indirectly a reflection of the condition in the larger society. The more the Caribbean region has veered away from its nationalist aspirations, the more difficult it has become to convince the populations that the region means anything beyond narrow individualism. As our governments have been forced or surrendered to the inevitability of the new neo-liberal global order, the notion of nation-building beyond the macro-political economy has been abandoned. The welfare of families and communities are no longer seen as the responsibility of the state and families, and communities no longer see their survival as linked to the collective.

It is from these disconnected, alienated communities that we recruit our cricketers. Is it any wonder, then, that in a team sport which requires a sense of the role of the individual in the outcome of the collective and vice versa, that we have been found wanting? We continue to produce players of distinction, but their exploits have not been translated into the success of the team. The great Brian Lara comes to mind in this regard—neither, his batsmanship` or leadership, mounted to West Indies glory. Chris Gayle has just declared himself “the greatest,” no doubt referencing his unparalleled exploits in the shortest version of the game. But, it may not even matter to Gayle that he is the greatest, in an era when West Indies cricket is at its weakest.

Our selectors have shown poor judgement of talent; hence we field wrong combinations of players. There is no doubt that there are some practical things that can be done, to at least bring our cricket up to competitive standards. But at the end of the day, we have no power to stop our better players from preferring to play lucrative club cricket, rather than for the West Indies. We also seem to have little power to determine who coach our cricketers and oversee a possible rebirth of our glory. We now have foreigners coaching our cricketers and managing our cricket—there is nothing more ironical than that. And, it is not as if we don’t have suitable West Indians to perform those functions. And what to do about players who evidently cannot read the game, who play as if their heads are somewhere other than on the field of play? The future continues to look bleak.