Some fans are al­ready say­ing not to try to beat a dead horse. They claim that the abysmal pic­ture which Richard Py­bus won the hearts of our Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) board of di­rec­tors to re­join and head the coach­ing staff of the West In­dies team, days be­fore an im­por­tant se­ries against Eng­land, is with­out any rea­son which lent it­self to his pre­vi­ous at­tempt at suc­cess.

I ask my­self: 'Why would a strug­gling CWI of the cur­rent era make such a de­ci­sion af­ter the re­sults of his first ef­fort some time ago?'

De­spite their de­sire to em­ploy the good­ly gen­tle­man, I am still very much a West In­di­an and hope that they will im­prove their per­for­mances (even on their own).

An­oth­er thought en­tered my mind: 'How is it that Mr Py­bus and his friend To­by Rad­ford have not been able to at­tract the at­ten­tion of the num­ber of pro­fes­sion­al crick­et teams in their own coun­try?'

Sec­ond­ly, ex­act­ly where is the ba­sis of as­sess­ment among the coach­ing con­tenders for this po­si­tion? Be­lieve me, that pic­ture is not clear.

Then there is the choice of for­eign­ers who have been cho­sen ahead of some of the finest crick­eters in our re­gion and they are spread all over the Caribbean. I do not re­call hear­ing of the se­lec­tion com­mit­tee vis­it­ing the oth­er coun­tries in search of ad­e­quate coach­es.

Maybe, the com­plex­i­ty of analysing the num­ber of qual­i­fied per­sons does not have a for­mat in which to seek the best of the lot. Maybe some type of in­for­ma­tion can be sought from the leg­ends of the great game who are in touch with the con­tri­bu­tions they are mak­ing in their re­spec­tive coun­tries over the years.

I sup­pose that the on­ly re­sponse for this com­ment is that the over­all tech­ni­cal qual­i­ty of the game from our se­lect­ed teams, is so base­less and un­suc­cess­ful across the Caribbean is­lands that no one seems to care.

We all know of the ex­cel­lence of the con­tri­bu­tions on and off the field by names like Sir Gar­ry Sobers, Sir Viv Richards, Desmond Haynes, Gor­don Greenidge, Gus Lo­gie, An­tho­ny Gray, and more re­cent­ly our own Phil Sim­mons.

Those who lis­ten to the an­a­lyt­ic val­ue of Ian Bish­op and Jeff Du­jon when de­scrib­ing the hap­pen­ings of all lev­els of crick­et and help­ing the play­ers in­di­rect­ly to im­prove their game as much as com­pe­tent coach­es will, may even, con­sid­er them as prospec­tive coach­es.

Yet still, the choic­es of our se­lec­tion ex­perts re­main with a group of strangers. Al­though my ear­ly years could have tak­en me through the pe­ri­od when Britain lit­er­al­ly owned the is­lands of the Caribbean. Colo­nial­ism tend­ed to en­gage in a be­hav­iour where the "Is­landers" tend­ed to give pref­er­ence to the Brits over the lo­cals when it came to lead­er­ship po­si­tions in sport.

To­day, the de­ci­sion to hire, fire and hire again Py­bus was sim­i­lar to the old time pol­i­cy where the for­eign­er was giv­en pref­er­ence over play­ers who had bet­ter play­ing and coach­ing cre­den­tials.

The reg­is­tered in­for­ma­tion along­side Py­bus’s name in the world of crick­et showed some mod­er­ate suc­cess in Eng­lish club teams. His prac­ti­cal per­for­mance as a play­er was not high­ly recog­nised at any lev­el not sim­i­lar to most of the chal­lengers who were vy­ing for a chance to take their re­gion back to the top of world crick­et.

Small won­der was the se­lec­tion of for­mer Bar­ba­di­an and WI fast bowler Vasper Drakes as an as­sis­tant to our Eng­lish friends, Py­bus and debu­tant to West In­dies coach Rad­ford, while the favourite coach­es of the Caribbean whom many felt should be cho­sen, were “dissed”. What a world!