A second Jamaican team could develop regional cricket

By Orville Higgins

A few days ago, Courtney Walsh said that the time has come when cricketers should be able to move easily from one territory to the next and play if we hope to lift the standard of the regional game.

As I understand it, that option is open to regional cricketers now, but nobody ever does it. It is a sentiment which we should not dismiss lightly.

The difference in strength between some of the teams in regional cricket is stark. The Jamaicans have won the four-day competition four years in a row, and by the looks of things, they are well on their way to making it five. Juxtapose this with cricket in the Leewards, for example. They haven't won anything since Whoppy had his altercation with Phillop! Indeed, they suffered the ignominy of being blown away for 39 in one of their two first-round games!

Because of this obvious difference in quality players between, say, Jamaica and the Leewards, there are many good cricketers sitting by idly in Jamaica, twiddling their thumbs when the regional tournament is under way. Meanwhile, some cricketers in the Eastern Caribbean, with half the Jamaicans' ability, are strutting their stuff on the first-class stage.

If what we want is for the best cricketers to play in the regional competition, in order to raise the standard of the game in the Caribean, something has got to be wrong with the current system. It's a dilemma, but how do we get around it?

Walsh's suggestion that players should be able to move around the islands at will is good - in theory - but that won't happen anytime soon. I don't see a Jamaican selector picking a rejected Trinidadian at the expense of another Jamaican, or vice versa. We have not reached that level of maturity.

Insularity rife

Not only does insularity still exist, but regional cricket has always been popular with fans precisely because it is a country-versus-country showdown. A Jamaican victory against Trinidad or Barbados is sweet, but would it be the same if there were three Jamaicans playing in those teams? I doubt it. If we do that, regional cricket, as we know it, would lose its edge, and maybe even its siginificance, to the average fan.

Other Test nations don't have this problem. The West Indies is not one unbroken geographical mass, but a conglomerate of sovereign nations with their own history, their own culture and, therefore, their own sense of national independence and pride.

Australia, England and India are individual countries with states or counties or provinces within them, and the logistics of a man playing for Kent and then moving to Surrey is, therefore, made much simpler than a man moving from Barbados to play for Guyana.

So what do we do? The quality of cricket around the region is quite lopsided, and because of this, too many good players from the top nations are not playing. Apart from the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) doing what it can to help the weaker territories, my suggestion is that the stronger teams like Jamaica be allowed to enter two teams in the competition. Jamaica could find a second team that could still be very competitive.

I could name a 13-man Jamaica squad that could defeat the eleven which so comprehensively beat Barbados! Indeed, a squad with the likes of Chris Gayle, Marlon Samuels, André Russell, Krishmar Santokie, Jerome Taylor, Gavin Wallace, André McCarthy, Jermaine Blackwood, Yanique Elliott, Maverick Perry, Horace Miller, Xavier Marshall and Jamie Merchant could go on to win the competition!

The vast majority of these players, though, won't play because the competition for places in Jamaica is so hot, while elsewhere in the region there are players in first-class cricket with suspect ability. The time has come to do something about that.

The WICB could take into consideration that rather than go for these substandard foreign teams to play in our regional competitions, which we do every so often, we could name a second Jamaica team. It would be a lot cheaper and do a lot more to develop our cricket.

Orville Higgins is the 2011 winner of the Hugh Crosskill/Raymond Sharpe Award for Sports Reporting. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.