The humiliating 27-run second innings at Sabina Park has reignited frustration across the region — not just with the players’ performance, but with the systems meant to support them. While legends have been invited to help diagnose the technical flaws, many believe the deeper issue lies in outdated governance and resistance to reform. Long-ignored recommendations for independent oversight and wider stakeholder involvement remain shelved, even as the team’s credibility erodes. 

Fixing West Indies cricket

Jamaica Gleaner/18 Jul 2025

EVEN AS he called an emergency summit on the state of West Indies cricket after Monday’s shame at Sabina Park, Kishore Shallow didn’t grasp the depth of the crisis facing the regional game, and a critical part of the solution thereto: the issue of governance

So, while Dr Shallow’s invitation to the West Indian legends, Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards and Brian Lara, to be members of panel analysing Monday’s batting debacle may be sincere and produce some results, there was a callowness to his effort to assuage and comfort regional fans.

Being bowled out by Australia in their second innings for a measly 27 – the second lowest total in the history of Test cricket – wasn’t an overly shocking aberration to be easily gotten over by West Indian supporters, as they rallied around the team. But for a few deceitful positive blips along the way, as most fans know well, West Indies cricket has been in continuous decline for three decades. And there is no certainty that Monday’s new low represented rock bottom.

Which is why many people will entertain with scepticism, and perhaps cynicism, Dr Shallow’s implied argument that West Indies cricket is on a defined path to rehabilitation, and that in the midst of their disappointment the team’s supporters should hold strain.

Said Dr Shallow, the president of Cricket West Indies (CWI), the regional game’s governing body: “While disappointment is natural, we must not allow this moment to define our journey. We are in a rebuilding phase, steadily investing in the next generation, and reigniting the spirit that has long made West Indies cricket a force in the world.

“Progress is rarely straightforward. It takes time, perseverance, and belief, especially in our most difficult moments. The road ahead will test us, but I have faith in the talent and commitment of our players when they apply themselves. We have already seen encouraging signs, particularly with the ball. Our batters are keen, but now must be even more deliberate as they work to improve.”

FALSE PROMISE

Those remarks carry loud echoes of those that have accompanied every false promise of the last 30 years, of the team “turning the corner”, only to be followed by another round of disastrous ineptitude and painful disappointment.

And it is not only that the team loses. It is utter capitulation that diminishes West Indians and insults cricket’s mirroring role in the region’s socio-political evolution – from plantation to independence.

While the iconic Lloyd and Richards, key figures in the great team of the 1970s into ’80s, and Lara, the outstanding batsman of the next generation, can help identify technical and psychological flaws in today’s players, they can’t address a key weakness that contributes to the team’s failure to grow and transform. That is in the gift of CWI and its owners.

In the aftermath of the Sabina Park humiliation, Lloyd argued that all aspects of the regional game had to be examined – from grassroots organisation to the international performances. Indeed, Mitchell Starc (six for nine in the second innings at Sabina) throughout the series badly exposed the inadequacy of the technique of the West Indian batters, whose batting, in many respects, reflect contemporary attitudes in West Indian society – an absence of ideology and an admixture of laissez-faire minstrelism.

But while stressed the need for West Indies cricket to “go back to basics”, Lloyd also made a compelling point that Dr Shallow and the shareholders of Cricket West Indies must understand and embrace in its full context.

“West Indies cricket is an institution,” Lloyd said. “It has given much to the people of this region and we must do all we can to preserve it.”

OWNERSHIP

Implicit in that statement is an appreciation of cricket as a public good. Its ownership inheres to all Caribbean citizens, to whom Cricket West Indies must be accountable – and not merely to its registered shareholders, the territorial cricket boards, which have serially resisted all proposals for fundamental reform.

Earlier this year, Dr Shallow made great fanfare of CWI extending the terms – from two to three years – of its president and vice president and limiting them to three consecutive terms. That was among recommendations made in 2020 by a task force chaired by the Jamaica businessman Don Wehby.

In reality, however, the Wehby report was cherrypicked. Left out, for instance, was the recommended halving of the 12 voting members, the six territorial associations appoint to the CWI board, and for the vacated slots to go independent appointees. There would be a non-executive chairman, effectively removing the role of the president.

Wehby also proposed a consultative Stakeholders Council, comprised of representatives of a wide range of regional organisations, so as to “increase the expertise available to CWI, to enhance the profile of CWI, to restore in the region a sense of unity towards cricket and to build public support for the game and CWI”.

That idea has been ignored, as was the recommendation a decade earlier by a committee headed by the former prime minister, P.J. Patterson, for a West Indies Cricket Commission, which would act as a policy and oversight body for a new cricket administration entity. The new entity would be a listed company, forcing it to be transparent and accountable to its shareholders.

Fixing West Indies must include an appreciation of cricket beyond sport.

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