Windies need the therapist

The New Year is likely to offer the West Indies only new negative entries in the record books, such as the one for the most 'ducks' in a Test series.

It is a neck-and-neck race to see whether the first 100 miles per hour delivery will come before the first Test score of all out for duck. On the 100 mph side of the track are the Australian Brett Lee, the South African Mfuneko Ngam and the Pakistani Shoaib Akthar.

In the other lane are the West Indies batsmen, the 11 most collapsible figures on any playing field anywhere in world sport. Watch the Windies and see three wickets fall for ten runs, and five for 17.

Behold the world's highest-scoring batsman raising his bat high in the air to a ball plainly pitching on leg and see the mighty numbers 375 and 501 not out become nothing. Watch the same team that posts a score of 400 in the first innings struggle to get past 50 in the second.

Portable telescope manufacturers dream of this kind of collapsibility; and the discerning West Indian cricket fan knows it will get worse before it gets even worse. Outside the West Indies, the fecklessness of the team is mysterious.

At home in the Caribbean, West Indians ought to recognise the failure of the cricket team as business as usual for any aspect of Caribbean life. Yes, there are almost as many cause-and-effect explanations as there are batting collapses and, yes, it is indubitably and always important, both generally and at particular times, to observe the correlation between factors and to adjust them to the most advantageous relative positions.

Today, for example, as the England 'A' team play in the Busta Cup the astute will note the ironic twist that England, who won handsomely the last Test series the two countries played, should be invited to take part in the Caribbean game at just the same time that West Indian players are being closed out of the English one.

The importance of English county cricket to the most glorious period of West Indian Test success cannot be overstated. Nor can the complacency to which it led be denied its own importance in creating the disaster-waiting-to-happen that is now the first five in the batting order, whoever they might be.

That complacency was falsely arrived at, for West Indian cricket did nothing at all to achieve the success of a team of effectively English-trained professionals.

In the micro, too, the study is worthwhile: it may show Caribbean players to be the net beneficiaries of the current Busta Cup exchange, as the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) hopes will happen.

You need only pick at any thread and the whole ball of wool unravels at once: the WICB, any member of which could mentally calculate the various margins on a television deal but few of whom could tell you how many runs have to be made to avoid the follow-on; bewildering coaching decisions such as the one not to have any net practice before the fifth Test in England after the fourth was lost in two days; the astonishing lack of discipline that allows players to gain such leeway; the list goes on as long as Curtly Ambrose's arm and longer than his patience.

It is my thesis that, no matter how many apparent solutions are devised, the failures will continue because there is no analysis of the real problem, precisely because it is not even being discerned, far less described.

All the writing, organising, training, and thinking is directed towards the middle when the problem in West Indies cricket lies behind the boundary.

What is happening in West Indies cricket is also happening in politics, literature, the media, the university and music. West Indian cricket is feckless because West Indians are themselves feckless. At all levels of life, Caribbean people face a continuous barrage of bouncers.

Apart from Trinidad and Tobago, buoyed by oil and natural gas, and Barbados, which continues to exist and even prosper on the sheer Bajan stubbornness Churchill might have called bulldog determination, it is difficult to find a real economy in the Caribbean.

There are rich people; and there are sufferers. St Lucia is one step away from Guyana which is one step away from Jamaica which is one step away from Haiti.

When no one can see that the entire Caribbean seems hell-bent on following the Haitian plan of development, it is not surprising that, for example, the WICB should be unable to see the damage they do when they refuse the players' request to send to Australia the same Rudi Webster who helped the team come back from the South African whitewash in 1998 to draw against the same Australia in 1999.

And for West Indians to see what they need, they must first look at themselves, which is the one thing a West Indian cannot abide. How do you send an entire nation into therapy?