Tony Becca

The Stanford Legends - 12 of the greatest West Indies cricketers of all time and including Gary Sobers and Viv Richards, two of the greatest batsmen the world has ever seen - have come out swinging again, and once again their target is the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), the body charged with the responsibility of guiding West Indies cricket.

According to the legends, and especially so according to Richards, Wes Hall, Joel Garner, and Courtney Walsh, the WICB has failed West Indies cricket.

Various issues

According to Hall, himself a former president of the board, the WICB gets money but does nothing with it.

According to Richards, the board has enough money to do what it should be doing, but needs a change in its personnel in order to do what it should be doing.

According to Walsh, the board needs more ex-Test players. And, according to Garner, the president of the Barbados Cricket Association and a member of the WICB, the board needs to develop the talented young cricketers around.

While some may question Hall, Richards, and Walsh re the money side of things and the number of ex-Test players involved, however, there is hardly anyone who would question Garner.

The fans would hardly question Garner for the simple reason that while not one of the Jamaica Cricket Association's competitions was sponsored this past season, while the board cannot find a sponsor for this year's one-day tournament, and while it cannot finance a professional first-class league in the region so that its first-class players can earn a salary (which suggests it needs money and plenty of it) and while up to a week or so ago, there were six first-class players on the board, including five Test players, the talented young cricketers around are not being developed.

Developing talent

As it has been over the years, with the possible exception of the years when Clyde Walcott served as coach in Guyana and Rohan Kanhai served in Jamaica, the talented, really talented, young cricketers in the West Indies have been left to develop all by themselves, to swim or sink.

Although the region has been blessed with great players like Learie Constantine and Manny Martindale, Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes, and Walcott himself, Sonny Ramadhin and Alfred Valentine, Collie Smith and Kanhai himself, Hall and Charlie Griffith, Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, Brian Lara and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, that is the truth and nothing but the truth.

In the past, many people, almost the entire population of boys, played the game, and there was, therefore, more from which to chose. From the early stages, the competition for places on school teams and on youth clubs teams made them better players, with cricket, in those days, being the way, at least one of the ways, out of poverty for many boys - to get a job and travel the world.

They trained and practiced and they became good players, some of them great players.

With the coming of more oppor-tunities, however, more sports and, therefore, more choices, travel, and money for playing other sports, plus better education and more employment, cricket is suffering. Cricketers, therefore, need more help to get where they want to go.

Not every one, in fact, very few, have the love, the dedication, the passion for the game of a Chanderpaul who trains and practices in an effort to be the best.

Needs training

The young West Indian cricketer, therefore, needs help, they need a lot of it, and especially so those with a special talent, those in whose hands a bat seems like a magic wand, those whose fingers, whose wrists does so much with the ball that batsmen are left bamboozled, bewildered, in a trance, and sometimes stroke-less.

They need help from people who know the game, people who appreciate that at the highest level only the best, the gifted, can survive much more perform.

And like Shane Warne of Australia, they need the help from people, from coaches and more so from selectors, who will look at them, see, at an early age, exceptional and unusual talent, guide them and then invest in them until they are properly developed and become master craftsmen.

I do not, honestly, believe the West Indies has produced a spin bowler with the talent of Warne, but I sometimes wonder how good - how great - would bowlers like right-arm leg-spinner Dinanath Ramnarine and left-handers Dave Mohammed and Andre Dwyer would have become had they been given a chance, a real chance like Warne was afforded, to develop their skills.

Give back a little

The Stanford Legends were all great cricketers, every single one of them, and they served West Indies cricket well, no question about that.

It would be great, however, if, like Walsh in Jamaica and Roberts in Antigua, some of them, if not all of them, were to give back a little.

The West Indies needs its former stars to assist in the development process - to show, even now and again, a youngster how to hold a bat or a ball, to talk to them about playing big innings against great bowlers, to talk to them about bowling deliveries that will knock away good batsmen and especially so on good pitches, and to impress on them the benefit of good and brilliant fielding and knowledge of the game.

The development process needs to start early, it cannot wait until a man has played Test cricket. And it certainly will not happen by importing coaches, especially coaches who are concerned with only those who are selected to play Test cricket.

On Wednesday night while watching Australia's bowlers being put to the sword in Delhi, I remembered two of Australia's great bowlers and I wondered how come Australia's coaches are so great, and yet they cannot produce another Glen McGrath or another Shane Warne.