Orin Gor­don

By the time you read this, the West In­dies could be dou­ble cham­pi­ons in World T20, men and women. Or dou­ble los­ing fi­nal­ists. Or ei­ther one of the men's or women's teams could win the cham­pi­onship. How­ev­er this plays out to­day, Dar­ren Sam­my's men and Stafanie Tay­lor's women have giv­en us great cheer these past few weeks. Work was put aside up and down the re­gion in the mid­dle of the day on Thurs­day as John­son Charles, Lendl Sim­mons and An­dre Rus­sell hit In­dia out of the game in Mum­bai, to deaf­en­ing si­lence from the crowd. For long stretch­es of the match, the on­ly sound, it seemed, was that of the ball thud­ding in­to the stands. It felt like a wake at the Wankhede.

It feels great to be root­ing for a suc­cess­ful West In­dies crick­et team, I have to tell you. Our test team has been so bad for so long that some of us had prob­a­bly for­got­ten what it's like to sup­port one that is at least halfway com­pet­i­tive, let alone beat Eng­land, South Africa, Sri Lan­ka and In­dia. The few mo­ments of joy in the long, bar­ren pe­ri­od has been in the short game. The Ba­jans Brad­shaw and Browne haul­ing West In­dies over the line in the late sum­mer evening gloom of south Lon­don in 2004 in the 50-over Cham­pi­ons Tro­phy fi­nal, and the T20 Cham­pi­onship win in Sri Lan­ka four years ago. Those West In­di­an cham­pi­onship wins, like Lloyd's teams' in Eng­land in 75 and 79, were more than sport­ing wins. But Lloyd's men ex­celled in both the long and short games.

Sam­my's men look hap­py in In­dia–as if they're en­joy­ing their work, and each oth­er's com­pa­ny. As painful as this is go­ing to sound to many Caribbean peo­ple–and it hurts me to sug­gest it–the time may have come to ques­tion and per­haps even end our par­tic­i­pa­tion in test crick­et. It's not sim­ply about be­ing com­pet­i­tive and in with a chance to win a tour­na­ment. It's not about chas­ing the new shiny ob­ject that is T20 and for­get­ting one of the things, test crick­et, that helped de­fine who we are as a unit­ed Caribbean peo­ple. It's more about ask­ing whether we should re­main wed­ded to an old, stale ro­mance that breaks our heart every time. It's over. It's un­hap­py. The mar­riage has ap­peared to be ir­re­triev­ably bro­ken down for decades. Let her go?

West In­dies have gone from first to near­ly worst in test crick­et in two decades. In tests we are ranked eighth out of ten, ahead of on­ly Zim­bab­we and Bangladesh. In ODIs, the Windies are ninth out of 12, but sec­ond in the T20 rank­ings be­hind In­dia. Maybe our play­ers are try­ing to tell us some­thing. Maybe we should stop try­ing to squeeze the tooth­paste back in­to the tube. Is it that the West In­dies are in de­cline as a test crick­et play­ing na­tion, or is our team fol­low­ing the tra­jec­to­ry of test crick­et it­self, which, with the ex­cep­tion of the Ash­es and a few oth­er con­tests, is suf­fer­ing from a flight of spec­ta­tors? The Caribbean's tal­ent pool is shal­low­est at six mil­lion, and our best play­ers don't seem to have the ap­petite for tests any­more, a de­vel­op­ment Chris Gayle hint­ed at in 2005 short­ly af­ter scor­ing a test triple cen­tu­ry in An­tigua.

Test crick­et is deep in the souls of those of us in the An­glo­phone Caribbean. One of our great­est sons, Bri­an Lara, is de­fined most­ly by his ex­ploits in the long game. Want to know how good Lara was? Watch a YouTube video of his 153 not out against Aus­tralia in Bar­ba­dos in 1999, chas­ing down 308. I cried, with what I imag­ine was joy and pride, watch­ing that game on TV, from a BBC Sports news­room in West Lon­don. I was the on­ly Caribbean per­son in that vast West Lon­don of­fice. Every­one had stopped work­ing to watch. I un­der­stood, then, how new­ly ar­rived Lon­don­ers felt when Ra­mad­hin and Valen­tine beat Eng­land in 1950.

So I can't quite bring my­self to say we should for­get about tests. Not with our his­to­ry. Not with Headley, Wor­rell, Lara, Richards, Gibbs, Ra­mad­hin, Walsh, Kan­hai and many, many more great West In­di­ans. I can on­ly sug­gest that we think about it, and we should. Say you were man­u­fac­tur­ing three prod­ucts, one of them icon­ic. The new prod­ucts were good qual­i­ty ones, but you could no longer guar­an­tee the qual­i­ty of the old­est, most icon­ic one. Would you con­tin­ue to make that thing? Or are some things ir­re­place­able?

Orin Gor­don is Ed­i­tor-in-Chief of the T&T Guardian. He has writ­ten for Wis­den On­line, Wis­den Crick­et Month­ly, and has done test and T20 in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et com­men­tary.

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