Editorial | What do they know of West Indies cricket?

It would be quite understandable that Johnny Grave, the Briton who is CEO of Cricket West Indies (CWI), may not be deeply invested in the political history and sociology of Caribbean cricket, or why images of the calypsonian, Lord Kitchener, and other early Windrush migrants running on to the field at Lord’s during the 1950 series, are so seared into the minds of older generations of West Indians. Or why people are nostalgic for the feats of the team that emerged a quarter of a century later, beyond the statistics of their exploits.

Mr Grave, perhaps, sees himself merely as a technocrat, concerned primarily with operational efficiencies, for which he is accountable to his chairman and directors of CWI, who, like most of today’s players, probably see and analyse West Indies cricket management and outcomes merely as a commercial and entertainment endeavour, little concerned with the historiography of the game.

So Mr Grave, in common with the other administrators of West Indies cricket, can be bitterly disappointed with, and accept collective responsibility of sorts for, the West Indies’ humiliating ejection from the T20 Cricket World Cup and sees no need to offer his resignation.

He is “no quitter”, Mr Grave said. Like West Indian captains, managers and coaches, and others in the setup after the latest humiliation, Mr Grave mounted the old, tired nag – back to the drawing board.

‘DO SOME SOUL-SEARCHING’

“I think it’s the time for everyone connected with West Indies cricket to reflect on how the game has changed, how it’s moved on, and what we need to do to compete on a global stage, because our system is not producing winning teams for many, many years now across all formats, and both in the women’s and men’s game,” Mr Grave said in a radio interview last week.

“So we need to do some soul-searching, dig deep, and collectively come forward to get our system back up to what it needs to be, which is world-class, because if it’s not world-class we can’t expect our teams to be.”

With squared jaws and stiff upper lips, we all have to get “over that disappointment very, very quickly and get even more energetic and focused on how we work to improve our system across the Caribbean”.

In other circumstances, this newspaper might have agreed with Mr Grave. Except that Johnny Grave has been the chief executive officer of Cricket West Indies since 2017. That is five years. His job includes coordinating all the elements of the game’s management that are required to produce the winning teams that have eluded the region “for many, many years”.

It is a tad late, it seems, for Mr Grave to be only now recognising the need for reflection by West Indian cricket leaders; that the game “has changed ... and moved on” across formats; and that there should be robust conversations on how the region, having been left behind, should catch up. It ought not to have required humiliations in Australia, at the hands of Scotland and Ireland, in a pre-qualifying competition of minnows, to come to that realisation.

RESIGN EN BLOC

Of course, this is not only Mr Grave’s failure. And its remedy rests not only on Mr Grave’s future – whether he stays or goes – or solely on the outcome of the soul-searching for which he has called – unless it leads to something deep and fundamental, as he implied.

Indeed, as we declared last week, this newspaper has become convinced of the need for a full overhaul of the organisation and management of West Indian cricket – something more than the piecemeal internal adjustment and peripheral external oversight which Cricket West Indies has fumbled with in recent years.

We suggest to the owners of CWI that they now embrace Professor Eudine Barriteau’s report for the dissolution of the organisation and the creation of a new one, with broader based Caribbean stakeholder interests, to oversee the sport in the region.

To clear the deck while the configuration of the new institution is being considered, the current leadership of the CWI, including the president, Ricky Skerritt; his deputy, Dr Kishore Shallow; and Mr Grave, plus their key lieutenants, should resign en bloc. An interim board would keep those professional managers who it believes are required for the organisation to function, until the new entity is in place.

Indeed, Mr Skerritt should urgently dispatch a memorandum to this effect to all the shareholder organisations of CWI, and propose a meeting before the end of this year to begin to put things in train.

In this regard, we commend to Mr Skerritt and Mr Grave and all others engaged in West Indies cricket, C.L.R. James’ question from his seminal work, Beyond A Boundary: “What do they know of cricket that only cricket know?”

The problem is more than, as Mr Skerritt claims, the inability of West Indian batters to play spin or make judicious shot selection.