Brian Lara is encouraging young West Indies players to come to him and the many readily available greats of the past for advice.

"My door is always open but, personally, I haven't had many guys coming in and asking me what's happening," the master batsman said after the whitewash against Sri Lanka in which his 688 runs were behind only England's Graham Gooch's 752 against India in 1990 in a three-Test rubber.

He knew "for sure" that former stars like Sir Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes "are always available to give advance at any time".

Coach Roger Harper, another player from the golden era of the 1980s, is "constantly with the team" and captain Carl Hooper has been a Test cricketer since 1987.

"When I was young, Viv Richards couldn't keep me out of his room," he said. "I was always there wanting to know about Test cricket and how to go about being successful."

Those who have either just come into the Test team or are aspiring to do so could only benefit from following suit.

"Our young players have got to realise that we've got cricketers (in the Caribbean) who have played a numerous amount of Test matches," Lara said. "They've got to pick their brains, they've got to think cricket, to think big, to be eager to do well for that's the way you're going to make it to the top."

While the West Indies always had the most talented teenaged players in the world, it was what happened to them after that that was the problem, he noted.

"Natural ability isn't everything," Lara, a first-class cricketer at 19, a Test player at 21, said. "We need to get them working hard on their game."

"Test cricket is for a man, it's not for little boys," he added.

The latest crushing defeat - the fifth whitewash endured by the West Indies in an overseas tour since 1997 - would be "a learning experience for every one", Lara observed, pointing out that he had been involved in every one of them.

But he was concerned about the psychological impact of such repeated failures on the several players in their early 20s.

"Looking at the team realistically, we've got a lot of young players, a lot of inexperienced players," he said. "I can remember going through my apprenticeship period on the outside looking in and the eagerness that I had to play Test cricket when I got the chance was great."

"At present, our young players are going through their apprenticeship while playing," he said. "As they gain experience, we're hoping that even though we lose Test matches down the line things will work out."

He believed that everyone should be involved, including the governments, in getting heads together and finding more cricket to put into the development of the game.

"Every other country is doing that," he said. "It might be another five years but there must be light at the end of the tunnel."

He used Sri Lanka as an example.

"They only started playing Test cricket in 1982 and are now reaping their rewards," he said. "I'm sure it's just not natural ability. They had a plan over the years and it's now coming to fruition."