Once again our crick­eters have not demon­strat­ed any lev­el of qual­i­ty on the crick­et field against Bangladesh in their first Test match. Just when we all hoped that the ex­pe­ri­ence of play­ing against In­dia in the re­cent se­ries, will en­cour­age a de­sire for im­prove­ment.

I ex­pect­ed that the main ob­jec­tive of be­ing de­feat­ed is to analyse the rea­son for de­feat, re-en­ter the nets more reg­u­lar­ly and work pro­fuse­ly un­der the eyes of their coach, es­pe­cial­ly with­in the weak ar­eas of their game.

I did not ex­pect to hear from cap­tain Kraigg Braith­waite what he felt was the rea­son for de­feat, es­pe­cial­ly when his sim­plis­tic opin­ion was that the op­po­si­tion was able to re­cov­er from an ear­ly demise in the first in­nings. There was no ex­ten­sion to his analy­sis, not even the ab­solute fail­ure of our bat­ting in both in­nings, and the tech­ni­cal break­down among our lead­ing play­ers, not once, but twice.

I won­dered why our play­ers and coach­ing staff al­so give pref­er­ence to ex­cus­es and not fol­low it with their next move in or­der to the im­prove the qual­i­ty of bat­ting.

A few days ago, the great Sir Gar­ry Sobers, the man who would cer­tain­ly know the sci­ence of bat­ting, bowl­ing and field­ing, was asked his opin­ion about the West In­dies crick­et. With­in the re­served com­ments com­ing from the great man, whose vis­it to T&T was to re­ceive an award for his bril­liant con­tri­bu­tions to the game across the world, there was clear­ly no ef­fort to pro­long the re­al rea­sons for our demise, as his short stay would have been de­stroyed and prob­a­bly em­bar­rassed the crick­et­ing au­di­ence with the hon­est truth.

That is the diplo­ma­cy of the ge­nius as he prob­a­bly re­alised that to ex­plain his ge­nius as a crick­eter was far too com­pli­cat­ed to ex­plain in just one en­ter­tain­ing evening. But be­cause of the ex­tra­or­di­nary pa­tience of our crick­et lovers, we are still hop­ing for a turn­around for the up­com­ing game.

How­ev­er, I have ac­tu­al­ly found some joy and great sat­is­fac­tion from the cur­rent par­tic­i­pa­tion pro­gramme lead­ing to the de­vel­op­ment of our young foot­ballers. My mem­o­ry had tak­en me back to the 1972-4, 1988-90 and lat­er on the 2004-6 youth pro­grammes, which ex­pand­ed through­out the coun­try, en­sur­ing that every child had an op­por­tu­ni­ty to show their worth.

The re­sults of those three pe­ri­ods brought ul­ti­mate progress to the play­ers from those eras, the third one bring­ing the qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the Un­der-17 FI­FA World Cup in Ko­rea.

This cur­rent pro­gramme has the mak­ings of a bright fu­ture if it is con­tin­ued in the strong ad­min­is­tra­tive man­ner and the com­mit­ted in­ter­est of young coach­es, teach­ers and im­me­di­ate ad­min­is­tra­tors of the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee.

So we have much to look for­ward to, and the sec­ond Test is our next stop. The pro­gramme of the youths should al­so be fol­lowed un­til we seen the bright­ness of the qual­i­ty of our foot­ball in five to sev­en years. Good luck to both.