Cricket: West Indies’ tragic decline

The West Indies cricket team have experienced “many lows” over the past two decades, said Nick Hoult in The Sunday Telegraph. But their loss to England last week “charted new territory”. Playing until 9pm under the Edgbaston floodlights, in the first day/night Test to take place in the UK, the visitors were defeated by a staggering innings and 209 runs, with two days to spare. For the first time since 1933, they lost 19 wickets in a single day, batting for just 392 minutes across their two innings – whereas Alastair Cook lasted for 583 minutes in England’s first innings, scoring 243. West Indies weren’t even entertainingly bad, said Andy Bull in The Observer. “There was no dramatic collapse, just a grim and inevitable subsidence.”

In half a century of watching cricket, I have never seen a worse Test side, said Geoffrey Boycott in The Daily Telegraph. “They can’t bat and can’t bowl.” To see a once-dominant team reduced to this is a “tragedy”. In Twenty20, West Indies are the current world champions, said Fazeer Mohammed in The Times. But in Test cricket, they have been in serious trouble for a long time. That decline has been caused by “chronic mismanagement”. The administrators that run cricket in the West Indies insist that players can only be eligible for the Test side if they play in domestic competitions. But those tournaments clash with many of the lucrative T20 competitions around the world – and given the choice between a big payday and appearing in Tests, the best players tend to go for the money. That’s why the side is so callow: the players at Edgbaston had just 195 caps between them, compared with England’s 569.

But the “cricket world” is also to blame, said Jonathan Liew in The Daily Telegraph. In 2014, India, England and Australia – the sport’s “Big Three” – joined forces to award themselves more funding from the International Cricket Council than the rest of the world combined; countries voted through the changes because they feared that if they resisted, the Big Three would retaliate by disrupting the cricket calendar. As a result, West Indies can’t even afford to pay their players enough “to make a viable career” in Test cricket. Fortunately, under a new funding model agreed this year, the smaller countries are set to get a greater share of the spoils – although India will still receive almost three times as much as anyone else. Playing against such weak opposition does England little good, said Simon Wilde in The Sunday Times. It was impossible to confirm whether new arrivals Mark Stoneman, Tom Westley and Dawid Malan are capable of solving the side’s top-order batting problems. Come November, when the Ashes begins in Brisbane, England will face “tougher tests”.