For­mer West In­dies cap­tain Sir Clive Lloyd is not hap­py with the sug­ges­tion made by for­mer In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et Coun­cil (ICC) chair­man Greg Bar­clay that the West In­dies be dis­band­ed and play as in­di­vid­ual coun­tries.

“We don’t have the peo­ple to sus­tain that,” Lloyd told sports jour­nal­ists.

Speak­ing vir­tu­al­ly dur­ing a me­dia in­ter­ac­tion from Guyana Mon­day, Lloyd, wide­ly re­gard­ed as the best-ever West In­dies cap­tain, said de­spite this re­gion’s small pop­u­la­tion when com­pared to In­dia, Aus­tralia and Eng­land, West In­dies have done ex­cel­lent in the past.

“We have a great his­to­ry and now you’re go­ing to tell us be­cause of a mon­e­tary sit­u­a­tion, (we should be dis­band­ed),” he said.

Lloyd linked the un­equal dis­burse­ment of funds by the ICC to the coun­tries for the dis­par­i­ty in per­for­mances.

He not­ed the big three coun­tries (In­dia, Eng­land and Aus­tralia) get as much as US$180 mil­lion while the oth­er teams get US$80 mil­lion.

“You could imag­ine they’re talk­ing about dis­man­tling the West In­dies, that is not the way to go. The way to go is to give them (West In­dies and oth­er teams) the same amount of mon­ey so they can im­prove their fa­cil­i­ties, get bet­ter sys­tems in place so that they can im­prove their crick­et.”

Lloyd un­hap­py with Two Tier Test

Lloyd, who is cred­it­ed with ini­ti­at­ing the dom­i­nance of West In­dies dur­ing the 70s to the 90s is against the idea of the sep­a­ra­tion of the 12 Test teams in­to two tiers.

“Teams hav­ing to tick box­es to play Tests, and all of a sud­den you’re go­ing to have rel­e­ga­tion and pro­mo­tion”, Lloyd not­ed.

“I think it will be ter­ri­ble for all those coun­tries who work so hard to get to Test match sta­tus and now they’ll be play­ing among them­selves in the low­er sec­tion.”

Jay Shah, who re­cent­ly took over as chair­man of the ICC, is ex­plor­ing the idea of a World Test Cham­pi­onship, with a top di­vi­sion that would com­prise Aus­tralia, Eng­land, In­dia, New Zealand, Pak­istan, South Africa and Sri Lan­ka, with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ire­land, West In­dies and Zim­bab­we in the sec­ond di­vi­sion.

Lloyd said that the pro­pos­al will not im­prove the teams, adding that by play­ing hard teams like In­dia and Aus­tralia, teams will be able to test their skill to know how good or bad they are.

World Test Cham­pi­onships needs work

The most suc­cess­ful West In­dies cap­tain said the World Test Cham­pi­onship is not or­gan­ised. Cur­rent­ly, the World Test Cham­pi­onships (WTC) cy­cle cov­ers two years but not all 12 Test teams take part, with Zim­bab­we, Afghanistan and Ire­land left out.

How­ev­er, the re­main­ing nine teams don’t all play each oth­er in the cy­cle.

“It’s not well or­gan­ised and such be­cause if I am in a Test team, I want to play crick­et so I can qual­i­fy for that sys­tem,” said Lloyd, who want­ed more fo­cus on the longest for­mat of the sport.

“They should sit down and have a sys­tem where it’s not on­ly T20 crick­et. Peo­ple still want to watch Test crick­et and un­til we get that right, we will all be in this sys­tem.”