No West Indies in World Cup 2023: Caribbean cricket's latest debacle no surprise

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Once the lords and masters of the cricket world, West Indies have been on the decline for a couple of decades now. Just how much they have plunged from the dizzying heights of the undisputed champions of the world was driven home on Saturday (July 1) when they were swatted aside by Scotland in the World Cup 2023 qualifiers in Harare, thus ending whatever tenuous hopes they had of making it to the World Cup proper in India in October-November.

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To those who have followed West Indies cricket even peremptorily over the last few years, this latest debacle should come as no surprise. Occasional pockets of brilliance aside, the Calypso Kings have been a team in unchecked decline; the very fact that they finished outside the top eight in the ODI Super League and therefore failed to secure automatic qualification (for the second 50-over World Cup in a row) had set off the alarm bells, though few would have bargained for the dramatic ease with which they have played themselves out of contention in the Qualifiers.

Super Over loss to the Dutch

It was a campaign that had begun with no little optimism, even if their two initial victories were against unfancied USA and Nepal. Their woes started from that point; well beaten by hosts Zimbabwe in their third game in the first round, they somehow failed to defend 374 against Netherlands in the next game, allowing the Dutch to secure a tie and then seal full points with a sensational Super Over performance when Logan van Beek smashed 30 runs off Jason Holder.

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With their vanquishers Zimbabwe and Netherlands both qualifying for the Super Six, West Indies therefore had zero carry-over points, which translated to having to win all their three matches in the second stage and then hope for other results to go their way. But they ran into a tartar in the Scots in their very first contest, bowled out for 181 and well beaten, by seven wickets with nearly seven overs to spare, on Saturday. The best West Indies can do now is end up with four points; only two teams will make it from the qualifiers to the main draw and Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka already have six points, so the Caribbeans are well and truly out of the race with plenty of time on their hand to ponder over how they have managed to hit rock bottom.

It needed victory in a rain-hit encounter, ironically against Scotland, for West Indies to sneak into the 2019 World Cup in England, where they ran a campaign to forget. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they went down to Scotland and Ireland in the preliminary phase of the 2022 T20 World Cup in Australia, failing to advance to the Super 12s of a tournament they had won twice previously – in 2012 in Sri Lanka and 2016 in India.

An unstoppable force

All of this points to an abysmal plunging of the depths from where, realistically, there is only one way to go – upwards. And if that sounds fanciful, it’s largely because West Indies have inspired little confidence in recent times, flitting between the ordinary and the ridiculous even as quick-fix, desperate measures and slightly more well-crafted plans to redeem their standing in the world of cricket have come to a disappointing naught.

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One wonders what the likes of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards, Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, not to mention the irrepressible Sir Garfield Sobers, make of this unholy mess. These giants had left no stone unturned in their bid to propel the Caribbeans to the top of the pile, driven as much by their pursuit of excellence as by the burning desire to stand up for themselves and for those like them discriminated against due to the colour of their skin. From the mid-1970s till late into the 1980s and beyond, West Indies were an unstoppable force, entertaining with their electric brand of cricket built around a battery of fast bowlers and exceptionally attacking batsmen with Richards in the lead and the likes of Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge, Alvin Kallicharan and Desmond Haynes not far behind.

Even when they were battering opponents into submission in the latter’s own backyard, they were raking up fans by the millions because of the endearing appeal of the nature and quality of their cricket. Every defeat – and there weren’t many, mind – was treated as the rarest of rare occurrence, a cause for despair across the many islands in the Caribbean that make up the amorphous entity called the West Indies and a reason to punch back with unbridled force for the men who represented the collective entity with fierce passion and desire.

Lure of T20 cricket

Unbeaten in the first two World Cups until India, against all odds, halted the juggernaut at Lord’s in an epochal final in 1983, West Indies rallied to reaffirm their status as the team to beat, but in one-day cricket, they were never the same force again. Even semifinal appearances were sporadic, and they rarely made a strong pitch for top honours despite boasting the likes of Brian Lara, Carl Hooper, Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose, and then Chris Gayle, Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo and their ilk at a later stage.

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The easy lure of the T20 format, which encouraged their carefree style that soon started to border on the careless, allowed them to stamp their authority on the two World Cups in that version that they lifted, but from then on, it has been a rocky road. If it was American basketball that was initially pinned as the reason for their unchecked downslide, now it is the mushrooming of T20 franchise leagues worldwide which appear to have doused even the 20-over fire that burned bright across Antigua and Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago.

And so, here we are now, with the 13th one-day World Cup a little over three months away and the erstwhile champions watching on from the outer. 1 July 2023 must go down in history as the worst day in Caribbean cricket, a day when the one-time kings, long since dethroned, chose to wave the white flag even without being threatened. It could also be the day that could flag the revival if the hurt is tangible, heartfelt and almost physical, but don’t bet your bottom dollar on that.

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