mikesiva wrote:The current series against New Zealand has seen the West Indies hit a new low....
There are several reasons for our decline:
1) County cricket being closed to West Indian players by ECB. Batsmen could no longer learn how to bat in conditions that encouraged you to move your feet, and bowlers could no longer learn to swing the ball.
Alviro Patterson wrote:mikesiva wrote:The current series against New Zealand has seen the West Indies hit a new low....
There are several reasons for our decline:
1) County cricket being closed to West Indian players by ECB. Batsmen could no longer learn how to bat in conditions that encouraged you to move your feet, and bowlers could no longer learn to swing the ball.
Since when?
England's_No7 wrote:Alviro Patterson wrote:mikesiva wrote:The current series against New Zealand has seen the West Indies hit a new low....
There are several reasons for our decline:
1) County cricket being closed to West Indian players by ECB. Batsmen could no longer learn how to bat in conditions that encouraged you to move your feet, and bowlers could no longer learn to swing the ball.
Since when?
Only the players that are in the current squad or have played a certain number of internationals can get a county contract now. I think any West Indian domestic cricketer could get one before but now they have to meet the strict overseas criteria.
Arthur Crabtree wrote:The money of the IPL may be a stimulus to talent though MIke? And is cricket popular among those with Indian ancestors? It may be that spinners, and helpful pitches, could make WI more competitive at home, as there may not be that overlap with athletics there?
greyblazer wrote:It is rarely about tall or shorter ones hehe. Migual Cummins, Pollard (dibbly dobblers), Kevin Cooper, Delorn Johnson, Jason Holder, Coterrell, Russell and from the little bit I saw of Kevin McLean are all tall. To bowl quick and succeed as a pacer you need a big heart. An athletic build is necessary but most of the Windies pacers since Amby, Bish and Walsh have tended to bowl just for the sake of it and that will take you nowhere. I like what I see of Cummins though. He runs in hard every ball and him not playing for West Indies is madness.
mikesiva wrote:The current series against New Zealand has seen the West Indies hit a new low....
There are several reasons for our decline:
1) County cricket being closed to West Indian players by ECB. Batsmen could no longer learn how to bat in conditions that encouraged you to move your feet, and bowlers could no longer learn to swing the ball.
2) Rise of athletics as a regional sport for success. It started with Quarrie and Crawford in 1976, at which time cricket was more popular than athletics in Jamaica. By the mid-1990s, that had changed in Jamaica, and now athletics have made inroads into getting talented sportsmen in places like Trinidad (Gordon, Walcott), St Kitts (Collins), Antigua (Bailey), Barbados (Brathwaite), Grenada (James), etc. My point about athletics is that we have a small population in the Caribbean, and a small pool of potential talented sportsmen. Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake both played cricket ahead of sprinting when they were at school, but both were persuaded, and opted, for athletics instead. They are both tall, powerful men, who could've been pace bowlers in another era, i.e. Holding, Patterson, Walsh. But now we can only produce short pace bowlers, like Taylor, Edwards and Best. I believe this is one of the reasons why....
3) Popularity of football, despite corruption and incompetence of CFU. Jamaica's qualification for the World Cup in 1998, and Trinidad in 2006, meant that football put further distance between themselves and cricket in those two countries, even though the national football programmes in those countries have been crap since then. I was in Jamaica last month, and all they could talk about was the failed World Cup campaign. A lot of folks didn't seem to be even aware that a cricket series was going on in New Zealand!
4) Fast-food mentality of the present generation means that they have no patience for Test cricket, and even ODI cricket. Youngsters are interested in sports that they can go to after work, and witness a completed result, i.e. a football match, or a T20 match.
5) Declining interest in cricket in the schools. When I went to school in Jamaica in the 1980s, we were able to produce cricket teams for every year group, i.e. first form, second form, etc. Now, the same school struggles to pull together an XI from the entire school to represent them at the schoolboy competitions. Michael Holding says the problem is the same at his alma mater. This has even affected the inaugural T20 competition in Jamaica. I see only eight schools were able to field teams for this competition. Ten times as many teams take part in the schoolboy football and athletics competitions....
6) Incompetence by successive WICB regimes have alienated a Caribbean public, leading to increased calls to "go it alone".
7) Increased irrelevance of the West Indies as a grouping. It has relevance to those of us on the wrong side of 40, who remember the Federation, and the movement for independence. But to youngsters nowadays, they are more interested in national allegiances. During the CPL, teams which bore national names drew larger crowds than the West Indies, i.e. Antigua Hawksbills filled North Sound for the first time ever, and Sabina Park was packed for the first time since the 1990s to witness the Jamaica Tallawahs.
Aidan11 wrote:Does this mean WI's players are going to have to do homework?
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