Tony Rakhal-Fras­er

Just in case the West In­dies Crick­et Board had plans to take cred­it for the vic­to­ry of the men's team in the World T20 com­pe­ti­tion, cap­tain Dar­ren Sam­my, with the cer­tain­ty he of­ten shows as a late-or­der hit­ter of tremen­dous pow­er and pre­ci­sion, scut­tled the thought from board pres­i­dent Dave Cameron. And he did so be­fore the watch­ing world.

"We had a new man­ag­er in this tour­na­ment in Rawle Lewis, he had nev­er man­aged any team be­fore. He came here, we were at a camp in Dubai, but we had no uni­forms, no print­ed ... he left Dubai, went to Kolkata, that's where he start­ed," said Sam­my at the end of his team's thrilling vic­to­ry in the 2016 World T20 fi­nal yes­ter­day.

Asked by the end-of-match in­ter­view­er (Nass­er Hus­sain) to make com­par­isons be­tween the 2012 first vic­to­ry of the WI in the T20 cham­pi­onships and yes­ter­day's, Sam­my de­lib­er­at­ed for a sec­ond be­fore re­spond­ing. In the end he thought it a grand op­por­tu­ni­ty to tell it like he and his team must have felt it.

"Dis­re­spect­ed by our board," was how cap­tain Sam­my chose to char­ac­terise the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the play­ers and the WICB. To be not­ed too in the con­flict be­tween team and board, the play­ers ob­ject­ed stren­u­ous­ly be­fore the T20 World Cup of the board re­duc­ing play­er pay with­out con­sul­ta­tion with the team.

But Sam­my was far from fin­ished with the board, its per­ceived in­ef­fi­cien­cies and its lack of the ba­sic man­age­r­i­al abil­i­ty to give guid­ance and in­spi­ra­tion to the team. To do so, the skip­per com­pared the ab­sence of in­spi­ra­tional mo­ti­va­tion from the board to that of Cari­com prime min­is­ters who have been ask­ing Cameron and his board to leave of­fice.

"I re­al­ly want to thank the heads of Cari­com, through­out this tour­na­ment they have been sup­port­ing the team, we've got emails, we've got phone calls, Prime Min­is­ter [Kei­th] Mitchell [from Grena­da]. He sent a very in­spir­ing email for the team this morn­ing ... and I'm yet to hear from our own crick­et board. That is very dis­ap­point­ing," Sam­my told the tens of mil­lions watch­ing the tele­cast all over the crick­et-play­ing world on sev­er­al con­ti­nents.

Sam­my's com­ment seemed a def­i­nite in­ter­ven­tion in the con­tention be­tween the Cari­com prime min­is­ters, who have asked the board to re­sign on the ba­sis of a re­port put for­ward by a spe­cial­ly ap­point­ed com­mit­tee to ex­am­ine the way for­ward for West In­dies crick­et and the in­sis­tence of Cameron and the board that they are not plan­ning to leave any­time soon.

Per­haps pre­dict­ing a neg­a­tive re­sponse by the Cameron board to his open ex­po­sure and de­nun­ci­a­tion of them, the St Lu­cian-born for­mer Test cap­tain said his farewell to the 15-mem­ber West In­di­an tour­ing par­ty and coach­ing staff.

"I don't know when I'm go­ing to be play­ing with these guys again be­cause we don't get se­lect­ed for one-day crick­et," said Sam­my. And he sought to re­in­force his crit­i­cism of the board by adding that "we (this cham­pi­on T20 team) don't know when we're go­ing to be play­ing T20," the sug­ges­tion be­ing that the board may not be ca­pa­ble of or­gan­is­ing se­ries against qual­i­ty op­pos­ing teams notwith­stand­ing the "cham­pi­on" sta­tus of this team.

He had a spe­cial word of praise for coach "Phil Sim­mons, who has gone through quite a lot," he hav­ing been sus­pend­ed from du­ties a cou­ple months ago by the board for re­port­ing what he con­sid­ered to be in­ap­pro­pri­ate in­ter­ven­tions by the board in team se­lec­tion.

But Sam­my did not for­get at least one of the crit­ics of the West In­dies, who seemed to have en­gaged in a mind game, or maybe in the mind of Sam­my it was tra­di­tion­al an­tag­o­nism that has long been ag­i­tat­ed against the West In­dies, and this time it start­ed long be­fore the se­ries got un­der way in In­dia.

"Mark Nicholas de­scribed our team as a team with no brains," not­ed Sam­my, but mak­ing it clear that the team with "no brains" had "the abil­i­ty to just put all those ad­ver­si­ties aside and to come out and play this type of crick­et in front of such pas­sion­ate fans, it's just tremen­dous."

Even be­fore Sam­my had said his piece to Nicholas, man-of-the match Mar­lon Samuels sin­gled out for­mer Aus­tralian leg-spin­ner Shane Warn­er for spe­cial at­ten­tion, do­nat­ing (with much sar­casm) his award to him: "Shane Warn­er has been talk­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly and all I have to say with­out talk­ing, this is for Shane Warne (as he held the tro­phy as if stretched out to the for­mer leg­gie) I an­swer with my bat not with the mike."

For the fu­ture, cap­tain Sam­my said the all round per­for­mance by sev­er­al play­ers dur­ing the se­ries "shows the depth we have in the Caribbean in T20 crick­et and hope­ful­ly with the right struc­ture and de­vel­op­ment our crick­et will con­tin­ue to im­prove in one-day and Test crick­et."