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The shame of Sabina: CWI’s Failure to Deliver

By Ralph Gonsalves
15 Min Read

CRICKET WEST INDIES: A BRAKE ON OUR CRICKET DEVELOPMENT

THE DEBACLE OF SABINA

On July 1, 2025, at Sabina Park, Jamaica, in the third test match of the recent cricket series against Australia, the West Indies were bowled out in the second innings for a paltry 27 runs, its lowest test score ever, and the second lowest test score of any test playing team since the advent of test cricket in March 1877; the West Indies were accorded test cricket status nearly 100 years ago in 1928.

The unmitigated disaster at Sabina was a soul-wrenching humiliation for the people of our Caribbean for whom, historically, cricket has been an instrument of national liberation, a core component of our ongoing social democratic revolution, and a distinctive cultural plank of our creolised Caribbean civilisation.  For our Caribbean people, cricket is played on the field but it exists in our minds, our beings, our lives and living, beyond the boundary, as a premier Caribbean philosopher and historian, CLR James, tells us in his classic Beyond a Boundary, first published in 1963.

It is not that we lost the recent test series three-nil; it is the manner of the loss: The abject surrender of our players, especially our batsmen, reflective of a mindset of a lack of will, commitment, energy, and skill which is at odds with aspirations, manifest and submerged, among our people as a whole.  The team exhibited a sense of impermanence at the wicket, indicative of an absence of a consciousness that they belong to a Caribbean civilisation of nobility, legitimacy, and authenticity, fashioned through the fever of our history, in our landscape and seascape; they eschewed any sense, in their endeavours, that they had any social obligation to our Caribbean community to assist in lifting us higher or any personal responsibility to their professional well-being and to our people who have lifted them up; they exhibited a demeanour of itinerant migrants, atomised individuals, who disdained any rootedness or belonging, to our Caribbean civilisation; they were rootless individuals as the metaphoric billows rolled, devoid of any social solidarity; rank individualism had triumphed over a social individualism; there was no communal bond to keep them steadfast and sure; they were unfastened to any moorings, completely ungrounded; they were disparate and desperate individuals; they had no anchor; they had no noise in their blood, no echo in their bones greater than their lost individual selves.

The people’s humiliation found outlets in justifiable rage, and a wit that served as the proverbial balm of Gilead.  One of my constituents, a small farmer from the bowels of the peasantry, and a cricket-lover who has, in recent years, been abused by the West Indies’ performances, turned to humour; he advised that Cricket West Indies should open “a duck farm” — after all, seven of the batsmen scored zeroes, “ducks” in cricket parlance.  Pointedly, he identified the officialdom of Cricket West Indies as villains of the piece.  He was not alone.

CWI’S RESPONSE

The official response of the Cricket West Indies (CWI) by way of the mouth of its President, Dr. Kishore Shallow, and the pen of its paid scribes who have been given basket to carry water, reminded all of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, through the words of Isabella, deeply critical of Angelo, a ruler, and his misuse of power:

“But man, proud man

Dress’d in a little brief authority

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d

His glassy essence — like an angry [bull]

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,

Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

CWI President and his shallow men and women in tow responded to the disaster at Sabina with arrogance, self-importance, strutting with their little brief authority, a lack of awareness, most assured of what they are most ignorant, playing fantastic word tricks, as to make angels weep; their powerlessness in not advancing any correctives was laid bare.  The great Tanzanian statesman, Julius Nyerere, once averred that it is oft-times true that power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts, too, absolutely. CWI is hereby advised, freely!

Shallow and his metaphoric jesters-at-court in their responses understood not the gravity of the situation, genuflected to the banal, assumed no responsibility and blame for the debacle at Sabina, uttered no “mea culpa” or contrition, and ascribed blame to everyone else but themselves and CWI.

Shallow, flailing about like an angry bull, stuffed with the conceit of an atomised individual, absurdly blamed Caribbean governments, especially that of Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, for not doing anything to aid the development of cricket; his jaundiced partisan political lens revealed his obsession with Comrade Ralph, and his Napoleonic delusions.  He was even more pathetic than the West Indies batsmen at Sabina, displaying precisely all that had so humiliated Caribbean people.  In his desperation, completely clueless, he dug deep into the despond of folly and vulgarity by accusing, wrongly, the critics of my friend, Darren Sammy, the head coach, of crass insularity; on absolutely no evidential basis, Shallow denounced these critics as being against Sammy because he is a “small islander” from St. Lucia.  His cunning, but transparent, ploy here was to raise his porous defence, by implication, that his own critics are against him because he hails from the small island state of St. Vincent and the Grenadines!  It is a truly laughable fig leaf behind which to hide Shallow’s follies and foibles; clearly the bassman of insecurity resides permanently in shallow heads.

Apparently, the CWI President has missed several memos: Vivian Richards of Antigua and Barbuda, smaller than St. Lucia, had been an highly-successful captain of the West Indies cricket team and the best batsman of his generation, globally.  So, too, the cricketing titans of the past: Andy Roberts, Richie Richardson, Curtly Ambrose, Ridley Jacobs and others; the current pace dynamo on the team, Alzarri Joseph, and others are from small islands outside of the “big four” (Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago).  Darren Sammy himself captained the West Indies and won two “T-20” world cups on the basis of his excellent captaincy and his own individual performances. A number of Darren’s critics, on his role as head coach, played under his captaincy, and that of Richards and Richardson — all “small islanders”.  It is true that in the distant past, in the 1950s and 1960s and before, there was “anti-small island” bias in West Indies cricket, but that attitude has long been exorcised.  That it remains in Shallow’s head as a veritable nightmare on his brain is instructive even as he was the successor to the CWI Presidency of Rickie Skerrit, a “small-islander” from St. Kitts.  This fact adds to the evidence of Shallow’s immaturity and unsuitability to be an integrative President of CWI if he permits an exorcised ghost from the past to dominate his thinking in the present.  Sad, indeed! It is evident some should never be elevated above the status of bridesmaid, and become the bride.

THE CONTRADICTION THAT IS CWI

At the heart of CWI is a profound contradiction: It is a private company registered in the British Virgin Islands which purports to have the monopoly on the management and superintendence of a public good that is West Indies cricket.  At the same time, CWI derives no legitimacy from the Caribbean people; its legitimacy is grounded in its attachment, and subordination, to the International Cricket Council (ICC), a construct itself which owes more to historical allegiances and contemporary Indian cricket imperialism, than to any other concordat of equality among participating cricketing countries, grounded in any popular legitimacy in the respective countries.

To be sure, in the Caribbean countries, which are under the presumed suzerainty of CWI, there are individual national cricket associations resting upon the base of participating clubs. Those familiar with these national cricket associations are constrained to consider them bastions of participatory democracy; invariably, many, if not most, of them are captured by self-serving cabals, often dependent upon the largesse and patronage of CWI, which itself is an ally in subordination to Indian cricket imperialism, the self-serving, allegedly, “beneficient” source of crumbs from the global cricket table for subservients. This suits well a class of West Indians, a section of the educated members of the oscillating petit bourgeoisie, and others lodged in the compandor merchant class, whose instincts are to serve faithfully their superordinates. In this milieu, internal cricket politics oft-times descends into a veritable blood-sport with contesting combatants forming blocs in quest of financial reward and/or status, defined as social estimation of honour, gained through, or within, CWI. In these circumstances, CWI defends its territorial turf aggressively against any presumed interlopers, however innocent and legitimate, with the concurrence of the ICC which gloats in its asymmetrical distribution of power and rewards.  

The main difference in the external relations of the old planter-merchant dominance of CWI’s predecessors, the West Indies Cricket Board of Control, and the current CWI is that the aristocratic-banker alliance of England and Australia which ran world class cricket from the ICC headquarters at Lords, London, has been replaced by ex-colonial business leaders from India who direct ICC, now based in Dubai, one hour or so from Delhi by executive jet. The internal alteration at the modern CWI is that the old West Indian planter-merchant elite has been replaced, by and large, by petit-bourgeois professionals and insurgent members of the comprador bourgeoisie who are on the hunt for lucre, power, and status. Cricket on the ground is largely incidental to them. The contradictions, made flesh at Sabina, had long been meandering through the dialectical material processes. An eruption has now occurred. And there is a crisis in the profound sense that the principals in CWI are innocent of the extent of the extant conditions and have no clear idea of the path forward. Thus, the demagogic posturing of the President of CWI and paid sycophants, and their groping in the dark, pleading with this or that legend to help them out of their own self-created quagmire. The centre cannot hold; things are falling apart. And the people of the Caribbean, the only genuine source of our cricket legitimacy, are demanding change, though with an inchoate agenda, thus far, which CWI is opportunistically seeking to divert and accommodate, in an uneven measure. But matters are now too far gone for CWI to succeed in its nefarious efforts. I am clear about this; and so, too, is the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and other governments in the Caribbean.

THE PEOPLE’S RESPONSE

Across our region, in the cities, and the hills and valleys, too, as Buju Banton proclaims, the popular response has been damning to CWI. Distinguished former test cricketers including Andy Roberts, Clive Lloyd, Carl Hooper, Jeffery Dujon, and Brian Lara have publicly demanded fundamental changes, inclusive of the demitting by the President of his office, and the resignation of the entire board of CWI, for starters, followed swiftly by a clinical forensic enquiry of the extant condition of CWI and West Indies Cricket, as a prelude to the shaping of a focussed plan of action with the involvement of all stakeholders. No sacred cows are to be left untouched. Several esteemed journalists and political personalities have weighted in, similarly.  The time for real action is now!

On social media, the people at home, and in the diaspora, cannot stomach the humiliation at Sabina, and the stench emitted from the citadels of CWI in its aftermath.  They have concluded, rightly, that the CWI, as manned and structured currently, must undergo fundamental change.  CWI in its current form is undoubtedly a brake on our cricket development, and the restoration to its former glory; that brake must be cast aside and a new dispensation emerge.  The small farmer in my constituency is prepared to proffer advice to the current leadership of CWI on a new venture: The establishment of their “duck farm”.

From my analysis here, a radical programme for action suggests itself.  Let us get on with it!

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The views expressed herein are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the opinions or editorial position of St Vincent Times. Opinion pieces can be submitted to [email protected].
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