The many roles of Ricky Skerritt

Ricky Skerritt is a man of many parts Rhodes scholar, former chief executive of St Kitts largest company, current manager of the West Indies cricket team.

His present guise encompasses a host of other roles diplomat, psychologist, headmaster, travel agent, time keeper, nursemaid to which his bosses at the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) have just added another, that of medical specialist.

According to a media release last week, one of Skerritt's assignments at the WICB meeting in Antigua this weekend was to answer questions about the injuries, illnesses and other ailments that spread through his teams like an epidemic last year.

The cause for concern is understandable and spelt out by WICB president Reverend Wes Hall the debilitating short and long term effects on the team and its development and the significant additional expense in treatment and in shuttling players back and forth to distant destinations to maintain numerical strength.

As for the causes, Skerritt can only state the obvious and speculate on the rest.

A dislocated elbow, a twisted knee, a wrenched ankle are plain bad luck, nothing more, nothing less. Strained muscles, stress (acute fatique syndrome is the new medical terminology) and some of the other reasons cited for aborted tours of late are something different.

It is why Hall said he would seek more qualified analysis from the Caribbean Association of Sports Medicine.

They might be able to add a valuable insight but Ronald Rogers, the sports therapist who has had to deal with more ailments in his short time with the West Indies team than most specialists at the QEH, has already provided one simple, plausible explanation.

It is that players now come into the West Indies team not fit enough to meet the demands of what has become a schedule of non-stop international cricket.

"The fitter you are, the less likely you are to get an injury and, if you do, the rehabilitation period is faster, he said.

Until clubs, schools and the territorial boards appreciate that and embrace what he terms a culture of fitness the cycle of breakdowns and withdrawals will continue, he warns.

It is a dictum that Dennis Waight, the tough little fitnessfreak from the tough world of Australian rugby league, instilled in Clive Lloyd's team when he was first assigned the job during World Series Cricket.

It was not talent alone that made the West Indies of that era so invincible. Their supreme physical condition ensured that the team was seldom disrupted by dropouts and was invariably at full strength.

The Australians and South Africans have more recently adopted the Waight philosophy, ratcheted it up several notches and refined it with the latest technology so readily available to them.

The effect is reflected in their present dominance on the field.

There is an awesome picture in one of the recent Australian magazines of several of their players in swimsuits on the beach. They look like perfectly sculptured Olympic athletes or, if you prefer, white Viv Richards and Desmond Haynes in their prime.

It is an image that helps explain their recent daunting record. Like the West Indies of the 1980s, they not only bat and bowl like champions but are panthers in the field, a factor sometimes overlooked in assessing great teams.

And they don't break down and they don't cry off at the slighest excuse.

The former England captain Mike Atherton, who had considerable first-hand knowledge of it during his time at the helm, has carried the correlation between an unfit team and an unsuccessful one the logical step further than talent and fitness.

Players become disillusioned and depressed by defeat. It creates a lack of self-confidence and leads all but the mentally toughest to seek to distance themselves from it.

A niggling pain here, some undetectable ache there, some trivial excuse is enough to escape the misery of yet another humiliation, such as those so frequently endured by the West Indies over the last four years.

In such an environment, the dressing room is filled with glum-faced crocks and airline seats with cricketers heading home.

It is a fair theory that explains why the West Indies could go through three successive series in the glorious 1980s with nine of the same players and yet had to call on 21 for three Tests and five One-Day Internationals in Sri Lanka recently.

Nor has the phenomenon only now manifested itself. Hall, himself then manager, had to call on three replacement players during the 1995 tour of England. Manager Lloyd had two of his number depart from South Africa in 1998-99 and six others unavailable at one time or other during the tour.

It is the reason why Steve Waugh disregarded a pulled hamstring to return to lead Australia in the last Ashes Test at the Oval in August, scoring a hundred with a pronounced limp in the bargain.

It is why then Garry Sobers refused to let an infected finger or Malcolm Marshall a broken thumb put them out of a Test match, and why Gordon Greenidge was at his most dangerous when seemingly lame.

Conversely, it helps to answer several of the questions that would have been put to Skerritt in Antigua.

It is up to those who listened to devise the solutions.