Until now, the infighting within West Indies cricket was proving detrimental only to Caribbean players and its fans. But now, this long drawn out battle has seen its first major casualty in international cricket, with the West Indies players deciding to pull out of the series in India.
Though the West Indies board said they didn’t pull the plug on the series, the Indian board are adamant the tour is off.
Pay disputes are nothing new in cricket but one struggles to recall such a move by an international team where an entire tour has been called off midway.
And mind you, this is no ordinary series. This was a full tour of India.
If there is one place where cricket make the maximum bang for the buck, it’s India and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) takes great pride in being the revenue generator of the game. This financial setback won’t be forgotten easily by the BCCI.
What makes the West Indies’ decision hard to digest is fact that other teams have continued series in the face of something as serious as terrorist attacks.
The Australian team went ahead with the 2005 England tour despite the July attacks in London while the Englishmen themselves played the Test leg of the tour of India after the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. In both instances, the stakes were high enough for both sides to go ahead in the face of adversity. But not this time, it seems.
The West Indies players and management don’t realise that calling of a full tour of India for an issue that could have been handled later on has set a dangerous precedent where even written commitments between boards aren’t being upheld. If bilateral series can be hijacked like this, then everyone might as well sit at home.
If the West Indies players were so disgusted by the way their representative Wavell Hinds had handled the pay negotiations, they could have refused to tour India in the first place and an alternate, albeit weakened side, could have been sent. They have done it before – against South Africa in 2004-05 and Bangladesh in 2009.
At least the fans would have received their piece of cricket action and all stake holders could have earned some returns on their investment. But everyone can forget about that.
Last year, the BCCI had arranged a short series against the West Indies at the last moment to allow Sachin Tendulkar to play his 200th Test and retire from the game with dignity. That series lacked any context as it was clearly planned for one person.
This time, it’s the West Indies who have painted the India series with a hue of absurdity that will only devalue the game.
