Where did all the quicks go?

If I say “Golden Arches”, you think “McDonalds”. If I say “Bill Clinton’s cigar”, you think…..well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, if I say “West Indies”, you are unlikely these days to think “4 frightening quicks” and the reason is painfully obvious when you watch their pitiful performances of late.

New Zealand have just wrapped up the second Test and thus the series inside four, weather interrupted days and as I watched Ian Bradshaw open the bowling with his medium pace dibbly-dobblers, I realised that West Indian cricket is not just in bad shape, it is positively insulting its ancestry.

The history of great fast bowling in the Caribbean dates back to well before the West Indian domination of the 1980’s. Great fast bowlers have emerged from the Caribbean like coffee from Colombia. A seemingly endless supply of talent with each generation. Except this one.

To be fair, Fidel Edwards looks a reasonable bowler. He has pace and an awkward 45 degree sling, but even he is not cut from the same quality of cloth as his forefathers. Where Edwards is awkward, his predecessors were positively menacing.

So where did the production line end? What set of circumstances contrived to deprive this great collection of cricketing nations of their fast bowling stocks and will we ever see the like again?

These questions have all continued to gather pace since the retirements of Curtly Ambrose and Courtenay Walsh when the lack of heirs was worryingly apparent.

For the deterioration into mediocrity to be reversed, one can only hope that someone in West Indian Cricket holds the answers.