BY HG HELPS Editor-at-Large [email protected] From Jamaica Observer

As ridiculous as it sounded, news came last week by way of a badly written news release issued by the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) —something that has become common in the last seven months — that legendary retired fast bowler Curtly Ambrose had been sacked as bowling consultant to the West Indies team.

Sprinting alongside that news release was the revelation that a training squad had been named to prepare for international assignments starting with India next month, and Pakistan later on.

The news release regarding Ambrose was as vague as the North Korean Government giving general directions to its nuclear stockpile. It did not say why the great man was being pushed aside and left one to wonder if something had gone amiss with Ambrose, or if he was heading out to more colourful pastures.

It seemed odd though, although nothing coming from the bowels of the WICB should serve as a shocker, that Ambrose was being replaced by one Roddy Estwick, a former Barbados fast bowler who, based upon his harvest of wickets, knew little about the art of fast bowling, and who, as a coach with the Barbados Under 19, West Indies Under 19, and Barbados, was like a man lost at sea.

Taboola

End Taboola

How could this have been allowed to happen? How do you replace Ambrose with Estwick and do it in such a cheeky way? The answer to the question was not far off. It soon emerged that Ambrose, like the rest of the cricket world, was taken aback by the decision by ‘coach’ Phil Simmons to replace him with his close friend Estwick, just by shifting the nomenclatures.

I’m sorry for West Indies cricket. If you look at how the game has been administered in recent years you will realise that there is little or no hope. If you think that an administration led by Wycliffe Cameron is the worst that the region has seen, it is opaque to understand why … there is rampant mediocrity in the middle ranks, as well as on the top shelf of the organisation.

Simmons, who himself was slapped across the butt by the same WICB some months ago for comments critical of the selection process, has now further insulted the people of the Caribbean by not only dumping a legend, but embarrassing him in a most despicable manner.

Just who is Phil Simmons? Well, he’s a man from Trinidad & Tobago who hardly ever had a good match while representing the West Indies, who went on to, among other things, coach Ireland’s cricket team. Did I say Ireland? Now you see why West Indies cricket is in the doldrums? Ireland has never won a thing in cricket, nor has that country produced any outstanding cricketer. Yet, we in the Caribbean thought that the man who last coached that team, one who never performed for the West Indies, was the ideal man to haul the West Indies from the doldrums that Cameron and his crowd have put it in.

When you look back at the recent West Indies coaching history, the last few coaches from the region have been men who never excelled as West Indies cricketers. They include Roger Harper, Gus Logie, Ottis Gibson, and now Simmons. It is not always the case that great players make good or great coaches, but the results are there for all to see.

Now, that situation has been compounded by the introduction of a bowling coach who knows little about bowling, and whose arrogant, dismissive style may prove detrimental to the West Indies team. To have replaced Ambrose with Estwick is a major punch in the nose for one who is far more knowledgeable than Estwick, has achieved more internationally than most fast bowlers globally, and one who had the players at full attention up to the end of the Twenty/20 World Cup.

But then we heard that Simmons wanted someone more ‘technical’ to work with the fast bowlers and that led to Estwick, who took 141 first class wickets from 37 matches, being chosen over Ambrose, a man with 405 Test wickets from 98 outings, and an even more impressive 941 first class wickets from 239 matches. If Ambrose cannot teach people how to bowl, then how can Estwick do it?

I am well informed that at the heart of the matter is the fact that Ambrose has not completed the Level 3 coaching certificate course, which the WICB wanted him to have. However, does not having a Level 3 certificate prevent one from coaching? So many of the greats of West Indies cricket did not have that qualification, yet they did exceptionally well as coaches, among them Sir Garfield Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, and Seymour Nurse.

Someone should have told Simmons to explore the possibility of offering Donald Trump a contract to work with those bowlers, because it seems that things have got so ridiculous that they can’t get any worse. Maybe even Trump will even rush for a can of insect repellent at the mention of the word cricket.

Too many ‘technical’ people have taken over West Indies cricket. They walk around with their laptops and brandish all sorts of devices, displaying every number in the book, yet the fundamentals of the game — producing challenging scores consistently and restricting the opposition — continue to stay away from every format except for the Twenty20 version.

If we are to continue thinking like that, in no time we will require all politicians desirous of becoming parliamentarians to have PhDs, or for a policeman to be able to apprehend a criminal, he must be well versed in the art of levels eight, nine and 10 of advanced law enforcement in uncharted jurisdictions.

Then the sorry training squad named is much harder to fathom. Although Simmons has been quoted as saying that the batsmen and spin bowlers called to the camp may not necessarily be part of the Test squad, it is hard to see the majority of them out of it, based upon current trends.

The team assembled will carry on its form of being demolished by even lowly rated aggregations. It is highly unlikely that those players will force a Test match into a fourth day, which will further sentence the West Indies to continued ridicule and condemnation. But then, based upon the strength of the West Indies in Test cricket, maybe the WICB should open special negotiations with other Test-playing nations for matches in which they are involved to last no longer than three days. That way, there might be limited guarantee that they will end up drawing a few matches.

The batsmen who make up the training squad, apart from Kraigg Brathwaite who has an average of 34 in Tests and 42 in first class cricket, barely average over 30, among them Jamaica’s Jermaine Blackwood with 33 from 15 Tests.

Barbadian Shai Hope, who has a problem moving his feet, averages 15.5 from six Tests; Guyanese Rajendra Chandrika is boasting an average of 14.5 from three Tests; while Jamaican opener John Campbell has shown glimpses of what he can do, but his first class average of 28 is not what is required for international cricket. That’s sad. How can you go up against big nations of cricket with people who cannot bat properly? And it’s not that better cannot be done. Some of the more accomplished players have been marginalised by the WICB, something which started to germinate while Cameron was vice-president, and escalated since he began sitting in the big chair three years ago.

The WICB has turned away its better cricketers by treating them shabbily and making demands of them that are as unrealistic as can be imagined. Darren Sammy, the captain of the victorious Twenty/20 team that triumphed in India in March, should be named a Caribbean hero for the sentiments that he expressed during the awards ceremony at the end of the final against England.

Instead of bashing Sammy, as some of us did — among them cricket writers who consider themselves credible, fair and objective — Sammy should be commended for having the balls to come out and tell it like it is, and not sweep the mounting garbage under the carpet. Someone had to outline the challenges that cricketers who represent the West Indies face, and get the message out there that people who like to dress up in their suits, travel to Dubai, push up their chests and show off their oversized egos, are not the people who keep cricket going.

An even bigger folly of last week was the selection of the West Indies one-day squad to face South Africa and Australia in the Caribbean, which did not include people like Chris Gayle, Sammy, and Dwayne Bravo, but miraculously had Kieron Pollard and Sunil Narine, despite the two not meeting what the WICB called its criteria for selection.

The WICB had not included Gayle, Sammy, Bravo, and Russell, because it said that they had not made themselves available for selection in the regional 50-over competition, like Narine and Pollard.

When will this cricket circus hop out of town?

HG Helps is Editor-at-Large at the Jamaica Observer.

IMAGE: BRATHWAITE … best of the young lot, but his average is still low

For more on this story go to: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/It-s-time-to-stop–dissing–our-heroes–and-get-rid-of-mediocrity_61622