The Guardian con­tin­ues to find in­di­vid­u­als with valu­able in­for­ma­tion and views on how West In­dies crick­et is to be re­con­struct­ed. One such crick­et gu­ru, for­mer two-time chair­man of the West In­dies crick­et se­lec­tors, Michael Find­lay makes known his to­tal re­jec­tion of the re­place­ment of the tra­di­tion­al pan­el of se­lec­tors in favour of the coach and cap­tain as the sole se­lec­tors.

“Tony, we all have our bi­as­es for one play­er an­oth­er, for what­ev­er rea­son,” says Mike, re­flect­ing on hu­man na­ture to “cur­ry favour” to per­haps play­ers from their own is­lands.

“Now, when you're on a pan­el, you bring forth crick­et­ing cri­te­ria to se­lect the team,” says the Vin­cent­ian wick­et­keep­er-bats­man who played 10 Test match­es for the West In­dies in the 1970s.

Mike was the cap­tain of the Com­bined Is­lands - Wind­ward and Lee­ward Is­lands - team in the fa­mous “Tan­ty Mer­le” Shell Shield match at the Queen's Park Oval ver­sus T&T. The game fin­ished with the two teams on the same num­ber of runs and was re­ferred to as a “tied-drawn” match, re­calls Find­lay. Live and alive and in colour, sto­ry-telling by Paul Keens Dou­glas cre­at­ed the last­ing im­age of a Tan­ty Mer­le (from the Is­lands) and her bas­ket of food and drink; it has be­come part of the lore of West In­di­an crick­et.

The se­lec­tion com­mit­tee of Find­lay’s time in­clud­ed Joel “Big Bird” Gar­ner and the shrewd Michael “Joey” Carey. Mike says they went to every game in the in­ter­re­gion­al tour­na­ments, watched and stud­ied the play­ers and their per­for­mances. When it came to pick­ing the team “we analysed, made deep as­sess­ments of the play­ers and their per­for­mances and dis­cussed it amongst our­selves be­fore pick­ing the team,” said the chair­man. Be­fore his six-year stint in the chair, Find­lay was a mem­ber of the se­lec­tion pan­el led by the great WI fast bowler, Wes Hall.

It must not be said “that se­lec­tion is made on the ba­sis of be­cause you like the per­son, that he's your friend and coun­try­man and so on; that is a dan­ger­ous, dan­ger­ous thing to do. So I re­al­ly think they (Crick­et West In­dies) should go back to the se­lec­tion pan­el sys­tem.” Find­lay notes that Eng­land once tried the coach and cap­tain se­lec­tion sys­tem but even­tu­al­ly re­turned to the for­mal se­lec­tion pan­el.

In ex­am­i­na­tion and un­der­stand­ing of one of the out­comes re­sult­ing from the emer­gence of the great West In­di­an crick­et teams of the 1970s in­to the 1990s, Find­lay says a West In­di­an liv­ing in Eng­land ob­served that near the end of the tour, the play­ers were look­ing glum.

“You are beat­ing Eng­land com­ing and go­ing, don’t you un­der­stand what that is for us,” the fe­male West In­di­an sup­port­er told them in the Eng­lish city of Birm­ing­ham where tens of thou­sands of West In­di­ans lived. “When you beat Eng­land we up here feel ten feet tall,” she in­formed her weary war­riors mak­ing them aware that be­yond the bound­ary there is a lot of pride and a sense of be­ing at­tached to the West In­di­an crick­et­ing na­tion and peo­ple; per­haps a miss­ing in­gre­di­ent in the teams of to­day.

“Our ob­jec­tive was to be­come the best team in the world. We had par­tic­u­lar pride in achiev­ing what we even­tu­al­ly did, that a black team from some small is­lands in the Caribbean had reached the top of World crick­et. We thought that was an achieve­ment, and we had worked for that,” said Find­lay with a glaze in his eyes as he re­flect­ed on a ma­jor fac­tor of West In­di­an crick­et­ing suc­cess.

Find­lay, like oth­ers, holds to tra­di­tion­al Test crick­et as the pin­na­cle of the sport; al­though not dis­miss­ing the pow­er, pull and pop­u­lar­i­ty of the con­tem­po­rary T20 game.

“As a hu­man be­ing Test crick­et ex­am­ines how much you un­der­stand the game. For ex­am­ple, if your team has lost four or five wick­ets, you have to be able to as­sess who else is there to come, the qual­i­ty of the bowl­ing and de­cide whether or not you are play­ing a sup­port­ing role to an­oth­er bats­man who's prob­a­bly bet­ter than you are.”

Find­lay re­lates his per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing in such a sit­u­a­tion at the wick­et with his skip­per, Gar­ry Sobers. Find­lay’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ty was to make a qui­et 44, while the great bats­man belt­ed bowlers at the oth­er end.

“When I look at crick­et now, even in the T20 for­mat, I don't see that sort of think­ing. When I played we would work bats­men out. Mal­colm Mar­shall was a bowler who spot­ted the weak­ness­es of bats­men very quick­ly and was able to ex­ploit them. So did Andy Roberts and Michael Hold­ing,” says Find­lay. He al­so places great val­ue on the af­ter-the-day’s-play dis­cus­sion and analy­sis about what tran­spired on the field.

“Al­so, you would read a lot writ­ten by the peo­ple who wrote books and gave their ex­pe­ri­ences in the game. That helped you too; crick­et is a think­ing game,” says Find­lay who at the end of his play­ing ca­reer be­came a sports jour­nal­ist re­port­ing for es­tab­lished news agen­cies such as the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice of Lon­don, the Caribbean News Agency, CANA, Ra­dio An­tilles, Voice of Amer­i­ca and ra­dio sta­tions in SVG.

Like oth­er ob­servers and com­men­ta­tors, Mike says there is in­suf­fi­cient com­mit­ment and pro­fes­sion­al­ism by our play­ers. Very im­por­tant was the re­al­i­ty that lead­ing West In­di­an play­ers were en­gaged pro­fes­sion­al­ly in Eng­land and that re­quired com­mit­ment “be­cause they had to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for their game; that was their bread and but­ter, if they didn't do well, they would be fired and won't get an­oth­er con­tract the next year.”

While he does not seek to de­ny the play­ers of to­day the right to play in the fran­chise leagues to earn mon­ey to se­cure their fu­ture af­ter crick­et “there is need for a bal­ance be­tween the lim­it­ed forms and Test crick­et, and play­ers must un­der­stand the role that Crick­et West In­dies has played in their de­vel­op­ment and be loy­al to that.”

He not­ed that play­ers of the pre­vi­ous age, the Lloyds, Fred­er­icks, Kallichar­rans, Mar­shalls and oth­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed suc­cess­ful­ly in all the forms of the game of the pe­ri­od.

Find­lay al­so makes the point that bat­ting tech­niques of to­day are poor, made so in part by the hus­tle of the T20 games where at­ten­tion is not paid “to get­ting be­hind the line of the ball and play­ing straight. What­ev­er the for­mat you have to find the open­ings in the field, take the sin­gles and twos, run the first run quick­ly and put pres­sure on the field­ers.”

He makes the ob­ser­va­tion that back then there were no coach­es and sup­port staff which are avail­able now, but our play­ers and teams do not seem to ben­e­fit from hav­ing such re­sources.

The strength and sta­mi­na of the fast bowlers of a pre­vi­ous era came from train­ing and fit­ness; the bowlers of to­day are not fit. So too ab­sent is the strat­e­gy of set­ting at­tack­ing fields through the shrewd­ness of cap­tain­cy: “I am see­ing teams go­ing out and just bat­ting, or bowl­ing, or field­ing, and with­out any in-depth think­ing,” the for­mer Com­bined Is­lands cap­tain ob­serves.

He is al­so crit­i­cal of bats­men who con­sis­tent­ly get out in the same man­ner and seem not to learn from their ex­pe­ri­ences. He cites the ex­am­ple left be­hind by Shiv­nar­ine Chan­der­paul, who would re­turn to the nets to work out a prob­lem which caused him to be dis­missed.

The most im­me­di­ate needs of West In­dies crick­et are: “We've got to ad­dress the tech­nique of bats­men; we've to ex­am­ine their whole frame of mind, their think­ing when they are bat­ting how to put pres­sure on the bowler; they have to be able to read the game: If your team is in trou­ble, you have to be a lot more cau­tious in your stroke play. Tony, crick­eters have to be re­spon­si­ble for their own per­son­al de­vel­op­ment; they need to com­mand re­spect in the way they dress, in the way they car­ry them­selves, in the way they re­late in terms of pass­ing on knowl­edge: When I hear them speak, some­times, I think that they're not think­ing deeply enough about the game. What are you go­ing to do to turn around your per­for­mance and that of your team; That's what peo­ple want to hear.”

On the im­por­tance and var­i­ous styles of cap­tain­cy, Mike Find­lay said, his first cap­tain, Gar­ry Sobers, led by ex­am­ple “be­cause he was this fan­tas­tic crick­eter, the best in the world. So he led by his own abil­i­ty. Clive Lloyd was dif­fer­ent, he was a stu­dent of the game, he would study every an­gle in the match.” As cap­tain, Mike said he de­pend­ed on sup­port from all mem­bers of the team who could come and say to me “skip­per you are miss­ing so and so.”

Michael Find­lay of the SVG be­lieves strong­ly “in youth crick­et in schools and youth leagues, the nurs­eries from which play­ers will come and the vil­lage coach­es such as Pa Ale­ong in T&T and Harold Ben­tic in St Vin­cent and the Grenadines and you have a num­ber of such per­sons in each is­land.”