Sports: Garth Wattley of ESPN Cric Info wrote that the West Indies cricket team was, at the end of 2011, still an edifice in disrepair, 16 years after the severe structural damage inflicted by Mark Taylor's* Australian side in 1995. However, there was also evidence of material being gathered for the solid and significant rebuilding work that remains to be done.
Wattley’s article said “Much of that must happen at boardroom level. The acrimonious relationship between the West Indies Cricket Board and the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) continues to cloud everything else in Caribbean cricket. That relationship worsened in 2011, to the point where at one stage the WICB and its CEO, Ernest Hilaire, were refusing to deal directly with WIPA president Dinanath Ramnarine”.
The board's efforts to develop players through the Sagicor High Performance Centre, and the progress of the women's team, have been commendable. But real and sustained development, and the smooth running of the game in the Caribbean, will not be achieved as long as the players' body is seen as an object to be circumvented and undermined. Any talk of a turnaround in West Indies cricket as a whole will be aimless until attitudes at the top change. Restructuring is essential.
Given that background, the overall record on the field remained modest. West Indies again lost more than they won in all three forms of the game in 2011.
Under a sub heading of Wattley’s lengthy article, ‘what 2012 holds’, he said that West Indies face Australia and England in Test and limited-overs series, and travel to Sri Lanka for the ICC World Twenty20 in 2012. The cricket will likely be harder than it was this past year, and the results are unlikely to change dramatically. The core group is still too green and too thin for a big turnaround. The task facing Sammy and his players will therefore remain the same: to become consistent, to be mentally tough, and to win. Just win.
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