WEST INDIES cricket has suffered a host of distressing days the world over these past seven years. None, in my unfortunate experience, was as agonising as the fourth day of the third Test at Newlands yesterday that degenerated into a display of demeaning incompetence.It was divided by the changed weather into two parts. The first 40 overs, under a heavy overcast, were horrible. The second 26, following a break for rain of three hours and mostly in bright sunshine, were palpably worse. As Herschelle Gibbs and Jacques Kallis comfortably added hundreds to the growing list against the West Indies, sharing a third- wicket record of 251, there was enough material to compile a full length comedy video of bloopers and blunders. There was one crunching collision between teammates, and another near miss, simple catches went through hard, nervous hands, fielders approached the ball as if itwere a slippery bar of soap, throw-ins were scattered around like confetti and Dave Mohammed put on a hilarious, one-man skating exhibition on the boundary.
It all had the crowd, the television commentators, hardened writers in the press box and even, on occasion, the West Indian players themselves, in stitches. For West Indies cricket, it was no laughing matter. Gibbs helped himself to 142, his second hundred of the series, and Kallis his third, an unbeaten 130.
While they were belting seven sixes and eight fours in 147 made off the 26 overs following the interruption, the perpetrators of such incompetence in the middle and those who nurtured them needed to ask themselves serious questions. Television viewers in the Caribbean would, doubtless, have been cringing. Great players no longer with us would have made yet another rotation in their graves. Yet this was by no means a one-off. There have been countless similar instances, one as recently as the second day of the previous Test in Durban.
It is a culture of mediocrity allowed to develop by ineffective administrators at territorial and regional levels and has become ingrained in players who are not prepared to put in the hard work necessary for success.
In certain societies, such embarrassment would prompt mass hari-kari. In most other