Tym Glaser, Associate Editor - Sport

HERE WE go again on the West Indies rollercoaster, wheeeee!

After a period of relative calm, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the players are drawing battle lines again.

WICB president Dr Julian Hunte fired the first broadside earlier this week at the International Cricket Council (ICC) meeting in Dubai.

Hunte, none-too-subtly, said the regional side was in danger of being "relegated" to the ranks of the irrelevant (read Zimbabwe and Bangladesh) on the international stage due to a streak of poor performances.

He also said that the players, the third-highest paid in the world, needed to start getting results in line with their remuneration.

That, no doubt, rattled a few cages within the West Indies locker-room and it didn't take too long for skipper Chris Gayle to fire a salvo or two back.

"If they (WICB) aren't careful, we are going to lose players," Gayle said, according to Fox.

"We've lost so many players right now, we've lost (Corey) Collymore, Pedro Collins, Tino Best, Wavell Hinds all those guys (to English counties or the Indian Cricket League).

"Who is to tell? You never know, we (the senior players) might just find ourselves there as well ... if the WICB structure doesn't get right we are going to lose a lot of players," he warned after a training session Thursday.

The blame game

He was also blunt about the reasons for the West Indies team's flop in the one-dayers against Australia and laid the blame squarely at the pen tips of the selectors.

"The discussion was that the selectors needed to look at a few players for (the) ICC Champions Trophy coming up ... but before the series actually started I said: 'Do you really want to experiment against a team like Australia?'. If so be the case, then it's going to be even more difficult to beat them.

"I just thought it was the wrong time to try these things, to experiment a lot, it was the totally wrong time."

Now, you can understand Hunte's concerns. Despite a brave fight in the Test series against world champions Australia and definite signs of improvement, the Windies still lost at home and remain anchored at eight in the world standings.

The West Indies cannot afford to wallow in mediocrity for much longer or their market value will drop off the charts and the richer and better nations will only accommodate them like they now do the Zimbabweans and Bangladeshis.

That could well be the death knell of cricket in the Caribbean and Hunte should be worried.

However, Gayle has a fair gripe too. The skipper and his team were probably as surprised as anybody to not only be called out by the boss but also to be told that they weren't deserving of their salaries.

Unnecessary jab

It was an unnecessary jab by Hunte and was about as fair as a Zimbabwean election.

Gayle also has a good point about the selection of the ODI team. It's okay to prepare for the ICC Trophy in September, but not against the Aussies. You can't expect to experiment and win at the same time against the world champions.

Hence, more losses; Doc Hunte gets more and more riled and then boom!

Extremely well paid or not, the West Indies players, well, the better ones, have a great out valve now in the lucrative 20/20 business in India and Hunte better take Gayle's warning about "losing" more players very seriously. He must initiate some peace talks before this matter blows up completely.

A mass exodus or mutiny of the top players would kill West Indian cricket far more quickly than some meaningless one-day losses right now.

Later.

Feedback: tym.glaser@gleanerjm.com