Basketball was always popular at school. I think some time ago Garfield Sobers rubbished that idea by noting that football, athletics and basketball were always popular in the West Indies alongside cricket. Less youngsters may be interested in cricket at school nowadays but I've never heard of a school not being able to compete in any of the school competitions in any of the territories. As far as I know the schools are all still able to field cricket teams each season.Googly wrote:Great reading, thanks JHunter! I had also heard that basketball was gaining in popularity at schoolboy level and the big athletic youngsters were being lured by the prospect of an NBA berth, any truth in that rumor?
Where things have broken down somewhat (or rather not progressed I should say) is in the transitioning from school cricket. It has been noted that once youngsters leave high school that some of the good ones get lost to the system as they pursue higher education. That was one of the reasons a Combined Campuses and Colleges team was created for players in universities and colleges around the region. And the CCC team did fairly well in some seasons. The pity though is that for this season the CCC has been axed from the first-class competition and only retained for the List A competition. I hope that eventually that will be reversed or that perhaps one day in the not too distant future they can institute a second XI competition or U-23 competition which could see the CCC playing alongside second string territorial teams in at least 3-day matches (perhaps in a format with a 2 groups playing single round robin and the top teams in each group progressing to the final; and adding WI U-19 to make it eight teams in total).
The root problem though is just the attitude of the players. MANY people will say "the board this.." and "the board that.." but will ignore (either willfully or unknowingly) the examples out there which throw a major spanner in the theory that the board is the root cause of the problems:
1. the very same West Indies board is responsible for the West Indies women's team and that team has been performing well (under Merissa Aguilleira their one-day record has been 36 wins, 1 tie, 30 losses and 2 no results while their T20 record has been 36 wins, 2 ties, 27 losses and 2 no results) despite not having nearly as many resources as the men's team and despite being run by the very same board that is supposedly the root of the problem in WI cricket. And what is interesting to note is that only within the last few years could the WICB even afford to start offering central retainer contracts to the women's team. And yet we never see the kind of acrimony between the women's team and the board as we see between the men's team and the board.
2. WI players (men's) actually get paid more than some of the teams that regularly outrank them and outperform them. And this increased pay is buttressed by the fact that international players (those on the WI team itself) do not pay taxes on their salary as part of a regional agreement not to tax integration bodies such as CARICOM. They also get paid in US dollars rather than local currency; a luxury many in the region do not have.
3. Other teams have had pay disputes and pay issues without going to the extremes of the current generation of WI players. England I remember had a long running pay dispute between the players and the board but the players continued to act professionally and focused on their game and kept their individual performance separate from the pay issue. Sri Lanka too had an issue which lasted for about a year I think (the players didn't get paid for a year I believe while it was being disputed and sorted out) and yet Sri Lanka almost always performs well. This lack of professionalism by the WI players has nothing to do with a lack of national pride although that is what a lot of people tend to think and they tend to come to the conclusion that players would perform better for the respective countries instead of the WI team. The traditionally best performing T20 territorial team, Trinidad & Tobago, showed just how wrong that conclusion was when they had a major pay dispute ahead of one of their appearances at the Champions League T20 when the team threatened to go on strike and not appear at the CLT20 (sounds very much like the WI team doesn't it?) unless the issue was sorted out. It is due to a lack of pride, but rather a lack of civic pride in themselves as individuals who are supposed to be professional. Whether it was WI playing in India or T&T playing in India, Bravo would have been threatening to strike during the tour and would have lead the abandonment of that tour. That's just his personality at play, helped along apparently by some advice from Ramnarine. The same applies for many others of his crop of players.
Getting back to Zimbabwe though, I think Zimbabwe and West Indies are generally on the right track with double round robin first-class cricket among franchise teams. Where they both need to work on though is the pitches I think and expanding the academy system (players who went to the Sagicor High Performance Centre in the West Indies have often done VERY well in it and come out of it with noticeably improved performances). Right now both Zimbabwe and West Indies tend to see scores over 250 in only about a third of the innings in the first class competitions whereas in other countries such as England, New Zealand and Sri Lanka scores over 250 tend to occur in between 55-70+% of the innings. When we start to see scores over 250 forming a greater and greater portion of the first-class scores then we will know that Zimbabwe and West Indies are well on the road to recovery.
