Out of the comfort zone

'No one in the Caribbean should be so swell-headed as to believe that it is a step down to learn from others about fast bowling, especially from someone so accomplished as Lillee' © Getty Images

What a wake-up call! Two Jamaican fast bowlers are learning some of the finer points of their craft from an Australian at India's pace academy. It's like the ladies at the breakfast shed travelling to Moscow to get certification from a Moroccan on how to make a decent callaloo.

This is the reality of West Indies cricket. It doesn't really matter whether the Stanford 20/20 is staged again next year, the year after that or ever again. It makes no fundamental difference to the state of the game in the region whether the money-spinning Super Stars showdown with South Africa comes off any time in the foreseeable future.

Ken Gordon and Dinanath Ramnarine can sign off on MOUs, agreements and procedural protocols till they run out of ink and the situation will remain the same. Former players can fall out with administrators, and vice-versa, and all we will have at the end of the day is more bacchanal to sir into the mix.

The fact that Jermaine Lawson and Andrew Richardson are benefiting from the tutelage of Dennis Lillee in Chennai is not in itself reason for alarm. No one in the Caribbean should be so swell-headed as to believe that it is a step down to learn from others about fast bowling, especially from someone so accomplished as Lillee, a man generally accepted to be one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time.

Nor should we be holding our noses at our players seeking to brush up on their technique by journeying to India, a country that, before the advent of Kapil Dev almost 30 years ago, seemed to consider fast or medium-fast bowlers as the human equivalent of sandpaper.

What this reality reinforces, however, is that other nations are well advanced in their recognition of the need to implement effective systems, along with importing the necessary expertise, to literally get up to speed with the requirements of the modern game.

The likes of S Sreesanth, Munaf Patel, Irfan Pathan and RP Singh may be a poor imitation of the fearsome Holding, Roberts, Croft and Garner, but the point is that Indian cricket is progressing significantly in one aspect of the game that they previously ignored altogether. And, of course, we don't need any reminding of who won the decisive final Test just over two months ago on a "result" pitch at Sabina Park.

To suggest that bringing an end to two years of bitter disputes between the West Indies Board and the Players' Association with some words on sheets of paper, or trumpeting that the glitz, the money and the organisational efficiency of the Stanford Twenty20 have put our cricket back on track are utter foolishness.

Just in case anyone forgot, West Indies were at the bottom of the ladder among established Test-playing nations before all of these threats and stand-offs began. The confrontational climate certainly would not have helped the situation, but the fractious arguments didn't trigger the decline.

Ironically, it was just as WIPA was starting to rumble that Brian Lara captained the regional side to a remarkable Champions' Trophy triumph in London almost exactly two years ago. Now, in his third stint at the helm, Lara leads the Caribbean squad on a three-month journey through Asia that I expect will underline why we should be one of the favourites to lift the World Cup in our own backyard next year, although a potential downside is that we will also again realise how far behind we are in the longer version of the game.

Put aside the embarrassment of having to qualify for a competition in which we are defending champions, and the upcoming schedule offers real possibilities to solidify a limited-over squad that performed so impressively against the Indians in the Caribbean earlier this year. A potential 18 one-day internationals, from Kuala Lumpur next Tuesday to Karachi on December 16, represent an ideal proving ground to not only fine-tune skills and tactics, but, more importantly in the context of the West Indian psyche, to build momentum and confidence in the countdown to the World Cup.

Yet along with all of that fast-paced action, there is a three-Test series in Pakistan where we will get a true appreciation of how far we have to go to get back to being consistently competitive in what is still the ultimate proving ground in cricket. Even in the heyday of the pace quartets and the great batsmen, the West Indies struggled to win in Pakistan, so expecting a series win, or even a draw now seems decidedly unrealistic.

But, more important than the actual results will be how these talented but still inconsistent cricketers play the longer version of the game. There is no question that the talent is there, however it is the attention span that remains the greatest challenge to captain, coach and the individual players themselves. The shorter the game, the better we are. Bowl with discipline, bat brilliantly, field spectacularly, we can do all of that. But sustaining that effort for session after session, day after day remains an elusive quality collectively.

Given the current trends in our cricket, this is more than likely to be an Asian adventure of mixed returns, underlining why, for all of the God-given ability, we probably need to take more of our players away from their comfort zones-to Chennai or elsewhere-to re-learn the disciplines that once seemed to come so naturally.