Hurting heroes

Sir Garfield Sobers: venting his frustration that West Indies' once proud legacy has come to this extremely sorry pass © Digicel

Here we go with another round of the almost threadbare personality debate, as if one great saviour from afar or at home will save us from the seemingly interminable decline of West Indies cricket.

I know many who still harbour hopes of a revival sometime in the foreseeable future, or even a few of those who are resigned to things becoming increasingly bleak, are tired of being hammered over the head with all of this negative news surrounding something that has given us all so much pride and joy for such a long time. In protesting that they have had enough, their concern is essentially that there seems to be almost an eagerness to pick apart whatever vestiges of respectability that are left.

There is certainly some merit to that argument, yet it still seems that too many people, especially a few in positions of influence, harbour the belief that it's nothing that an academy, a superstar coach, plenty money and a fully professional league won't sort out in a few short years. Will it really matter if the West Indies Cricket Board chooses to again go foreign in appointing the apparent favourite, Dav Whatmore, as head coach?

On the other hand, can Ottis Gibson or any other Caribbean candidate do anything meaningful to even slow the decline (I think we're all agreed now that the turnaround that many were confidently predicting year after year was just a mirage)?

More and more, those who were prepared to be guarded in their observations, for fear of being seen as jealous former players only intent on hitting our current crop of heroes for six, are starting to swing for the hills in the manner of the just-concluded Twenty20 World Cup.

A report in yesterday's Nation newspaper in Barbados highlighted just the latest of those instances, with the greatest all-round cricketer of them all venting his frustration that our once proud legacy has come to this extremely sorry pass, due in no small measure to players who seem totally disconnected from their relevance as West Indies cricketers.

Cricket in the West Indies is very important to the people in the West Indies, even if the players don't think it's important to them Sir Garfield Sobers

"Players have to start thinking about the game as a team game and go out there and try and play the best for their team and forget self performances," said Sir Garfield Sobers, who was speaking after participating in the opening ceremony of the island's National Heroes Gallery and Museum of Parliament on Wednesday. "Cricket in the West Indies is very important to the people in the West Indies, even if the players don't think it's important to them."

None of this is especially earth-shattering, as we've heard it said by many personalities before over the past decade. But when someone of Sobers' stature takes a turn in the players' tail, you know it can't just be dismissed as the ranting of some run-of-the-mill naysayer.

The only living member of Barbados' current list of ten officially designated National Heroes, Sobers was assigned to work with the senior West Indies squad as an adviser in October 2004 at the same time that Bennett King had commenced his term as head coach. Many viewed the appointment as a public relations exercise to soften the public backlash at choosing a foreigner to take charge of the regional side.

His comments of two days ago suggest that even if he were sincere and committed to the effort, the reaction of the players turned the whole thing into a waste of time.

"A lot of the young (players) think players like myself, Sir Everton Weekes and Wes Hall have passed and have nothing to pass on, but that is where they are wrong," he contended. "I think we have more to pass on. We've been through it, we know what it's like, we know how to build a team and what a team needs to win."

Again, we've heard this all before from other sources, except that you can almost feel the deep sense of hurt in Sir Garfield's words. I wonder if he was ever made aware that another left-hander of more recent vintage (no, not Brian Lara) once claimed to be better than Sobers after being admonished by a member of the technical staff for a particularly poor shot in the nets during the 2001 home series against South Africa?

Incidents like that which used to raise eyebrows or cause others to splutter in disbelief, are now accepted as a matter of course from this lost generation of pretenders. Almost everyone can refer to his or her favourite moment, either on or off the field, that encapsulates the causes for the plummet from the summit. It may be a wild swipe when the match could still have been saved or a wild swipe at a teammate at a nightclub bar.

Never let it be said that the champions of previous eras were all paragons of virtue, certainly not Sobers, who enjoyed the good life and nightlife as much as anyone else. Yet as his peerless record reveals (8,032 runs at 57.78, 235 wickets at 34.03 and 109 catches in 93 matches - to go into further detail will require two more columns), he never let external distractions get in the way of delivering on the field.

Compare that with the abysmal statistics racked up by most of their strutting, image-conscious successors, and you realise that the more our golden icons expose the naked emperors who now represent us, the better the chances of reality taking root and bearing fruit in the next generation.

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