Lit­tle won­der it is that Mr Clive Lloyd and Mr Ja­son Hold­er hail from Guyana and Bar­ba­dos re­spec­tive­ly. But, be­fore I pro­ceed, let me hur­ry to dis­close that Lloyd is a good friend of mine, that my pa­ter­nal grand­fa­ther nev­er lost his Ba­jan ac­cent, and that my ma­ter­nal grand­moth­er not on­ly was of Ba­jan an­ces­try, but al­so was a Hold­er.

It is nei­ther ac­ci­dent nor co­in­ci­dence that the Caribbean coun­tries that gave us Lloyd and Hold­er are two of the three that have what it takes to "man-up" and make the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) their court of fi­nal ap­peal.

"Man-up" was part of the in­junc­tion from Hold­er to his team af­ter the West In­di­an (I choose not to say West In­dies here) de­feat at the hands of South Africa in the third One day In­ter­na­tion­al (ODI), and I doubt that that had noth­ing at all to do with the re­sult of the fourth ODI. Whether the ef­fect of it will sur­vive in­to the fifth we will soon find out. For now, I sus­pect that Lloyd must be sat­is­fied with his com­mit­tee's choice of cap­tain.

For my­self, I find that Hold­er has come across as a se­ri­ous, con­scious and com­mit­ted West In­di­an with ex­cel­lent lead­er­ship qual­i­ties. He must re­main in place.

As for Lloyd, he does not have a thing to prove as far as lead­er­ship cre­den­tials are con­cerned. He is, be­sides, not on­ly his own man, but al­so very much a no-non­sense man, as wit­ness the hap­pen­ings on Old Year's Night (that is how I still call it) 1974 in Cal­cut­ta, In­dia.

I was stay­ing at the same ho­tel as the team, and New Year's Day would be the last day of the Test, West In­dies bat­ting, with all three re­sults still pos­si­ble, but, at the Eden Gar­dens venue, the third out­come be­ing a bit re­mote.

I was priv­i­leged to be on the fringes of the team meet­ing at the end of the day's play on the penul­ti­mate day. One open­er's wick­et had fall­en, so Roy Fred­er­icks was free. To the oth­ers the cap­tain's in­struc­tions were clear and un­equiv­o­cal; they would be in their rooms no lat­er than 8 pm and stay there un­til morn­ing. Dur­ing the evening I ac­com­pa­nied the cap­tain on ei­ther two or three room-in­spec­tion tours. The suc­cess the team en­joyed un­der Lloyd did not come be­cause of tal­ent alone.

As it turned out, we lost that match. I said to Clive that, had I been at home in Trinidad, I would, like all good West In­di­ans, have been de­clar­ing with ab­solute cer­tain­ty that the Test had been lost on­ly be­cause "dem fel­las was fete­ing whole night."

Be­fore we West In­di­ans can de­vel­op fur­ther in our home­land, we would have to learn to show re­spect to one an­oth­er, es­pe­cial­ly when we strong­ly dis­agree.

And we would have to ac­quire some self-re­spect and some self-con­fi­dence. A good way to start would be by show­ing some re­spect to our crick­et team se­lec­tion com­mit­tee and by bold­ly and with pride (notwith­stand­ing the mis­chief be­ing per­pe­trat­ed by peo­ple hold­ing high of­fice in T&T to­day) em­brac­ing the CCJ.

Ho­race Broomes

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