THE failure of the West Indies cricket team to qualify for the World Cup was inevitable. Of course the players performed extremely poor, but these players represent the best of what we have to choose from.

Most of them-with the exception of Nicholas Pooran, Alzarri Joseph, Jason Holder, etc-would have been selected based on their performances in our domestic leagues-ie, our four-day competition or the local leagues in each individual territory. This, therefore, indicates our local cricket is badly falling short of international standards. I have never seen a West Indies cricket team drop so many catches.

Our standard in every department of the game has hit rock bottom. There are a number of reasons for this demise. When we ruled the cricket world, all the players in that era played county cricket, hence our raw talent, and we had lots of it back then, were harnessed by the English county coaches, in the best facilities and under some of the best conditions to fine-tune their cricket skills and knowledge.

Lloyd’s team didn’t have a travelling, batting or bowling or fielding coach. English county cricket provided us with that. Manager and captain, and that was it. When the English stopped providing those facilities, up to this day nothing has been put in place to replace it. That is when WI cricket started to decline.

Fast-forward to the last ten years and the onset of this stupidness called T20, where as soon as they can hold a bat, our young, talented players are lured in this madness of hitting the ball in the air with restricted field placement, and bowlers bowl four overs per game with sometimes more staff than players.

How, tell me how then can batsmen improve their batting, or bowlers develop accuracy and skills?

We have to be brutally frank. We have batsmen being selected with averages in the early to mid-twenties.

What, then, do we expect when they face up to the top bowlers in the world? Or when our bowlers have to bowl longer spells at Warner, Smith, Root, Stokes, Sharma, Koli?

If we are honest we would not just blame the players or the coaches, but more specifically a broken system that is spewing out mediocrity and substandard cricketers. The blame has to be shouldered by the entire Caribbean for allowing the hard work of the conquering teams of the past to fade.

Derek Wint St Joseph