By Dennis Brookes, Barbados

When will the West Indies improve? Ok, they won the ODI series in Zimbabwe but still managed to lose a game to a team vastly inferior, supposedly.

Brian Lara hung on and delayed his retirement until he helped them turn the corner and saw them to some sort of form where they might record victories on more of a regular basis. But I’m afraid, though it pains me to say it, he would probably have been 65 if he had have hung on till then.

It is a great shame that this proud cricketing team with such a great history and not only for winning cricket matches but for uniting islands continues to go from bad to worse. It is almost 13 years now since Australia knocked us off our perch and we have slid ever since.

The really frustrating part is that the players are there and the talent is clear. In Chris Gayle, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Dwayne Bravo and Fidel Edwards, we have five players who would stand a chance of making any team in the world, maybe with the exception of Australia. So what is going on?

My belief is that although the system and administration is abysmal, especially as players are not looked after following tours and are left to lose their fitness levels on their own islands, we do make too many excuses for them.

There are some genuine excuses as I have alluded to above. There are more, such as their main sponsor Digicel, which in exchange for paying a few million dollars, has created more disunity, arguments and unhappiness among players and administrators in three years than what their predecessor Cable & Wireless ever did in 18 years. They dictate unfairly to players and the board is not strong enough to say ‘hold on, no more’, because they need their money.

But that’s going off the subject. I still think we have the players and they need to start to forget about all the negatives going on around them and really focus on winning. They should channel all their frustrations and the pride of playing for West Indies into their games and show the world what it has been missing for the last 15 years.

Maybe then, we can stop banging on about how great we were, with Viv Richards, Malcolm Marshall & Co. and start boasting about how great we ‘are’!

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