“I just hated it when in Australia, a few years back, there were two West Indian teams playing at the same time,” said Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and former Director of the West Indies Cricket Board, when we spoke four years ago. “One was a conglomerate of players plying their trade in the Big Bash League and entertaining a world audience with their skill. The second was the West Indian national team that was getting hammered in the Test series.
“We had to do something.”
Beckles devised a ‘secret’ plan with the University at the heart of it. “We had to keep it a secret,” he said. “We knew there would be resistance from the officials and had to discreetly go about the plan. The public in the West Indies had almost given up. Most were of the view that the players who had turned free agents had every reason to do so because everyone deserved to have a good life. Our economy was in a bad shape and that made people feel that the superstars were well within their rights to give up on the national team and do what they loved doing, play the franchise leagues and earn money. While we couldn’t stop Gayle, Narine and the lot from doing so, we also needed to get our cricket back on track.”
Prof. Beckles and his team at the University of West Indies thereafter decided to set up a state-of-the-art cricket academy and a proper first-class cricket facility for the University students in Barbados. The 3Ws Oval was redone and the first batch of students to make use of this facility was the class of 2012. And some of the members of that class include Jason Holder, Shai Hope, Shannon Gabriel, Carlos Brathwaite and Kyle Hope.
The University soon appealed to the officials in charge of Barbados cricket to allow the student team to play in the regional championship. Naturally, the request was turned down. Things changed when Joel Garner took charge of Barbados cricket and, with Beckles being a personal friend, agreed to allow the students to play on a trial basis. If they made it to the top four in their first two years of participation, they could stay on. Failing this, they would have to go back to the University league. The students won the competition in the second year itself and have been winning it ever since.
“Once we had Barbados won over, we appealed to the West Indies Cricket Board to allow the students to play the national competition as a nation,” said Beckles. “If you see our competition structure, all of the islands play against each other. We wanted the students to play like an island. By then, I was part of the West Indies Board and could pull a few strings. After some cajoling, the student team was allowed and in 2017, they won the national competition beating all the islands. Now there is no looking back anymore.”
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“Let me tell you a story,” he went on to say. “When Ben Stokes was bowling the final over in Kolkata to Carlos Brathwaite and the entire world thought England had won it, we were sitting in the University pub watching that game. You can ask my colleagues to cross-check what I am saying. I took out a 100-dollar bill, placed it on the table, and said Carlos can do this. I had seen him do it day in and day out at the University, and knew he had the ability to hit four sixes. And he did.”
There were a number of finer points that Beckles and his team had to look into. While Brathwaite and Holder were talented young students with immense potential, they weren’t finished products by any means. That’s when they went to Curtly Ambrose, who wasn’t doing much at the time. “Curtly said to me that he didn’t have a coaching degree and wouldn’t be allowed by the officials of the West Indies Board to coach a team,” said Beckles. “I remember saying to him the student team had been allowed to compete as a special project. We immediately consulted our lawyers, and they pointed out that if the team was a special project, the bowling coach was also a special project. The Board bought into the argument, and we got Ambrose to come and coach Holder and Brathwaite.”
The final piece of the puzzle was to win the cricket fans over. “When England came to the West Indies in 2019, we asked Jason to do what no West Indian team had done recently. Beat England in a Test series. Our project was all in place now, and Jason had the team to do the job. He is a fantastic leader, and all of you have seen what happened. That’s when all of the superstars who were away playing the leagues also realised that they needed to come back and play for the West Indies. World Cup 2019 was the first time in 15 years that we had our best team playing.”
They had to a degree turned things around.
“It took us seven years and I can tell you something very significant,” said Beckles. “The fans are back to following the West Indies team. It is the class of Jason Holder that has made this possible, and the University has been at the centre of this story. Now we are all waiting for the concluding piece.”
Four years down the line, the West Indies will need Beckles and men of his ilk to do something spectacular yet again. Make one more plan. Keep it a secret. But do something to stop this freefall. If the World Cup of 2019 offered hope, World Cup 2023 is the lowest point ever in the West Indian game. And they will need men of vision to steer them out of this. Beckles is certainly one of them. They will need to start believing that it is possible. Take pride in who they are and what they have done in the past. The first step will be to make the players agree that playing for the national team and doing well is relevant, and perhaps more important than doing so in franchise leagues. To be a cricket great, you still need to do it for West Indies.
Yet again, West Indies will need a leader who can step up. Someone the players look up to and the fans believe in. World cricket needs a strong West Indies, and the only good thing is it can’t get worse. So, as Beckles and others sit down to chalk out the road map going forward, they will know that it can only get better from here on.
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