Since your playing days Alvin you have had a few different jobs like Kenya coach, salesman for a stationary company and starting your own ‘Kalli’ cricket equipment. What are doing now?
I’ve been involved with Lashings now for a few years, playing the odd game, being part of the management, arranging sponsorship and fixtures in the winter months. I love it. It would be a great way to finish my sporting life, if things work out that way.

What is it about the club that you enjoy the most?
The camaraderie in the dressing room is great and with Lashings being an international outfit, it’s not just West Indians I’m mixing with. There’s Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, Pakistanis and so on. We’ve got a team from all over the world with experience who have played the game to the highest level and it keeps me young. I feel very proud that they respect me so much in the game to call me that nickname (‘leg’ short for legend).

You are a Warwickshire legend after breaking so many records for your adopted county and a West Indies great also. Do you keep in touch with any guys from those teams?
Not as much, and with my job at the moment it’s hard to fit in social things. We move on in life and sometimes we forget the past. Sometimes your past does not get recognition, whereby you don’t fit in, so you have to move on.

Do you return to Warwickshire much and do you feel welcome there?
I don’t know if I do. I don’t really know if I do. It’s just that the past has gone, I’m happy that I played for Warwickshire for 20 years, it’s a lifetime career to be at one club for 20 years. I see myself as an employee and when your employment finishes you have got to move on and that’s the way I saw it then as well.

That’s quite a cold attitude in a way, that you don’t feel part of the club’s history or a legend who is still loved there?
Well that’s the way it seems to me.

Would you love to get a call one day saying ‘Alvin can you come back and do some coaching with our batsmen’ or something to that effect?
I would love to do that tomorrow morning, because Warwickshire has been my life. The time I spent at Edgbaston was like a lifetime. Not many players are at one club for 20 years any more. I as a person feel privileged to have done that because I have always been a professional.

Does it disappoint you that you haven’t been back much?
It does. Whenever I go back the same old supporters from that period it makes me feel happy and they are the ones I feel sorry for. Last season we played a game at Dorridge and the same old Warwickshire supporters were there. It was a really, really great day for me to meet them again, to meet friends again and to spend some time with them. I haven’t felt like that for a long period of time.

Do you have the same sadness at the way West Indies has treated you or other former players? Would you have liked to have had more input after your career?
Me and other former players would love to play a part to help us be centre stage again in the cricket world. You are not going to be at the top all the time but what we didn’t bargain for was to see us drop from one extreme to the other. We would have expected to still be in the middle or fighting in the top four. To have dropped like we have is something none of us would have foreseen to happen to West Indies cricket.

Does it disappoint you that the last two coaches have been Australian, with Bennett King and now John Dyson, given the cricket knowledge around in the Caribbean?
It’s nice to bring in coaches from other areas - that’s not a bad thing, but you have got to understand people’s culture. What makes them tick? What makes them successful? What makes them want to work? You have got to understand the culture of a place to make things work. We have done that for a period of years now but it hasn’t worked. We need to get the great players who have achieved and who have been hurt to…tell what playing cricket for West Indies stands for. We need them involved with grass roots cricket and give these kids an education (in cricket). We need to start a whole new cycle and get to the kids now, that’s where we need to go now. You need to teach the kids what West Indies cricket means. You need to know the names of players who achieved things for West Indies. You need to teach them about success and about the people who created that success, to make life easy for those coming in.

So you feel the next best step is to re-install the pride in cricket in the region by approaching the youngsters at grass roots level?
Absolutely, they need to know the history and what it means to play cricket for West Indies. When I came on to the scene as a young player I was fortunate in a way because people like Sir Gary Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Lance Gibbs, Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith were all at the height of their careers and I walked into an institution. To walk in and share a dressing room with these men – my role models – I said to myself ‘I want to follow them’. That is the attitude you need. Believe me it was an education listening to them. You couldn’t talk, they would shut you up but not because they were disrespectful, they wanted you to listen and learn.

Even though you are not currently connected to West Indies cricket does it feel painful to see the team struggling so much?
It does because in my job I am amongst people all the time, talking about cricket and I get asked that question day in and day out. It’s like playing a tape, giving the same answer to people whenever they mention the West Indies’ problems. It’s very sad.

Do you feel as though you don’t want to talk about West Indies now because of the depression they find themselves in?
It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, it is just sad to see the demise we are in. The old players will get together every so often and we will talk about what is happening. There are problems and the cricket board has to recognise there are problems. But because the board is in such a situation we don’t know what is going to happen next. There is no continuity or smooth running of our cricket. And it’s like batting, if the top is not sound, there is no bottom. You can’t fight from the bottom, you have to fight from the top.

I suppose the two World Cup wins would be your career highlights?
We are proud people, West Indians are proud sporting people and to achieve that….it’s a memory. At that period we didn’t take it as a memory, it was continuity. We were just carrying on our progress. But only now when you look back as a memory do we realise how we started a cycle.

Finally, with modern day cricket swimming in money – mostly Indian money – do you understand the direction the game is heading, given that 30 years ago you attempted to gain entry to the then-lucrative Packer World Series and also in the early 1980’s accepted money to join a ‘Rebel’ West Indies tour to South Africa?
For sure, for sure, with this new era of the Twenty20 more money is being pumped into the game and you can never blame the players for what’s happening. You are never going to have it both ways as a player, you have to miss one (national cricket or lucrative Indian cricket) and that’s a decision you have to make. Which one to take? Which one is right or wrong? Then go for it.

Is it fair to say that the South African conundrum, when you were banned for touring there, came at the right time of your career after more than a decade of Test cricket? Players now are having this decision in their early or mid-twenties.
Oh yeah, as I say it is a decision one has to make about one’s life and career and one’s future.

We might get to the situation where, if the ‘rebel’ Indian Cricket League is continually frozen out, half of the top players from the poorly paid nations like West Indies, New Zealand and Pakistan go to ICL for the money. Should they be serving bans? Should the International Cricket Council be doing more to protect the game?
We never who the ICC is or what they do. Nobody knows ever who the ICC is. ICC is a body who conveniences people or who can create positions for people. It’s a creation of a position. I don’t know what they do. They say we are going to have a meeting to have another meeting. That’s the ICC.

Alvin Kallicharran was speaking with Richard Sydenham

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