Editorial | Roston Chase’s job

Given the available talent, the selection of Roston Chase to captain the West Indies in Test cricket is probably as good a choice as any, and better than most, including those who were in direct competition for the job.

Chase, a Barbadian, is, by international standards, a middling allrounder. He bowls offbreaks competently and is a more than useful lower middle-order batsman, who displays a steady nerve and a capacity for batting improvisations, especially in the limited-overs format of the game.

Regarding his playing statistics, over 90 innings in 49 Test matches, Chase has scored 2,265 runs at an average of 26.33. He hit five hundreds and 11 half centuries, with a top score of 137 not out.

In bowling, he has taken 85 wickets at 46 a piece. His best figures are eight for 60. He has taken five wickets in an innings four times.

Obviously, Chase is no Ben Stokes, his batting/fast bowling contemporary in England’s team, who has scored over 6,700 Test runs and 35.4 per innings and taken 210 wickets, at 32.4. Nor is he Ravindra Jadeja, the Indian orthodox leg-spinner and batsman, or even Australia’s Cameron Green.

Roston Chase, 33, is who he is: Roston Chase, a decently talented cricketer, who, more often than many of his colleagues with greater talent, shows a willingness to fight. There are glimmers, too, of a potentially thoughtful man, which the captaincy will hopefully draw to the fore.

SERIOUS QUESTIONS

Much, however, will depend on how much Roston Chase wanted the job, the context within which it was accepted, the job, and the framework within which it was bestowed. In other words, there are serious questions about what is expected of the new captain and the mandate he has been given.

For even if his tenure leads to an improvement of the regional team’s recent record, Chase could well be like most West Indian cricket captains of the recent past: part of a purely market-oriented, laissez faire enterprise, totally disconnected from the social and political history of the sport.

We trust that this was not the sole basis upon which he was selected, and on which he intends to lead. Winning is important for the sustainability of the sport of sport in the West Indies.

But, it is also important for the region’s sense of wellbeing, and for people’s confidence in the capacity of the Caribbean to overcome obstacles, recover from calamities and to rebuild. West Indians, even those who were not particularly enamoured with cricket, lived vicariously through their team, especially its victories over the old dominions. Many people discerned parallels between the advancement of West Indies cricket and the epochs of Caribbean social and political development.

In few sporting endeavours has a team’s performance collapsed so precipitously, or taken so long to recover as the West Indies in Test cricket.

In nearly two decades of dominance between 1976 and 1995, the West Indies played 128 Test matches, winning 60 and losing only 19. Fifty-one matches were drawn. The West Indies won nearly eight times more often than they lost and were more than twice as likely to win than draw.

But in the nearly three decades since 1996, the team has won only 51, or approximately 24 per cent, of the Tests it has played. It now struggles against most teams.

SENSE OF MISSION

It can’t be Roston Chase’s responsibility to rebuild West Indies’ cricket dominance, especially in the game’s longer format. But as the leader he can make a difference with the sense of mission with which his team approaches its matches, and how they play the game, where individual glory is understood to be part of the region’s collective achievement.

When viewed through this prism, a great obligation also rests on those who manage West Indies cricket in trust for the region’s citizens. It is their responsibility to have given Roston Chase the appropriate mandate, and to have prepared him as best as possible to do the job.

It is two months before the new captain takes the field against England. The preparation, in both planning on-field strategies and the leader’s role in shaping a unit that is cognisant of its responsibilities should have started.

Among the things Roston Chase must be advised to do is to eliminate from his speech those jarring and annoyingly vacuous verbal tics of his predecessors about “going back to the drawing board” and “positive takeaway” after regional teams lose matches. Usually, it is a lazy avoidance of responsibility and meaningless attempts at sugar-coating of failures. Chase must talk fully and frankly about strengths and weaknesses, and about ideas.

Further, Cricket West Indies must identify appropriate people to engage team’s leaders and managers in informal discussions of the writings of C.L.R. James ( Beyond a Boundary) and Sir Hilary Beckles ( The Development of West Indies Cricket: the Age of Nationalism and My Journey to James: Cricket, Caribbean Identity, and Cricket Writing) and others on the regional game. CWI must also find ways through these informal talks to invoke George Headley, Learie Constantine, George John, Garfield Sobers, Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Viv Richards and others.

Indeed, a full and formal engagement of these matters should be sine qua non for anyone who aspires to leadership or a senior management position in Cricket West Indies.

As James posed in Beyond a Boundary: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”