Rev. Wes Hall, someone who has spent all of his adult life intimately involved in West Indies cricket, touched on a theme that has recurred time and time again during its headlong plunge into mediocrity over the past dozen years.
The West Indies, he noted in his address to the Rotary Club last week, have some of the most talented cricketers in the game. Always have. What has led to the present mess is indiscipline at all levels and its certain derivative, a non-existent work ethic.
As player, selector, manager and West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) president, Hall is well placed to appreciate where much of the responsibility lies.
When Pat Rousseau became board president in 1996, one of his first decisions was to drop the last word of the organization's title that had existed since its formation in 1927. So "Control" disappeared.
It was, no doubt, simply an exercise in semantics.
Instead, the board has, on all evidence, taken it literally, especially in relation to its attitude to the matter of discipline.
It has appointed as captain two players, Brian Lara and Carl Hooper, with more disciplinary charges against them than any other and allowed both to be laws onto themselves.
During his long and otherwise celebrated career, Lara has issued no fewer than seven public apologies for his own indiscretions. The eighth, last week, was on behalf of his team. Yet he has been twice persuaded to return to the leadership.
There are countless other examples that condemn the control-less WICB.
It turned a blind eye to the astonishing choice of four players to head for the partying Red Stripe Mound at Sabina Park immediately after the West Indies had been humiliated by an all-out total of 47 and heavy defeat by England.
It slapped a few offenders on the wrist after the disastrous 'A' team tour of England in 2002 that prompted Wisden, the game's bible, to comment on some of the younger players that "their behaviour made more of an impact than their cricket".
And do on, ad infinitum.
It is no wonder that players now have such a disregard for curfew times. It explains why they can walk off the ground in the middle of a training session, complaining it is too taxing, as has been the case in this World Cup.
Nothing exemplifies the WICB's compliance to such defiance than its inaction over the behaviour during the 2007 Carib Beer Challenge Final between Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados at Guaracara Park in Trinidad.
At the televised presentation ceremony that followed the match, Deryck Murray, the former West Indies vice-captain, founder member of the West Indies Players' Association (WIPA) and now, as President of the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board (TCCB), a WICB director, wasted no time in expressing his disgust.
"I don't think I have ever played or been a spectator at a game where the umpires' job has been made so difficult," he said.
Anyone watching the live television coverage of the climax of the domestic West Indies season would not have considered it hyperbole. It was nothing short of disgraceful.
Murray revealed that seven incidents were reported to the match referee, adding that these did not take into account the others that were not.
"Here are the two best teams in the region, role models for our cricket in the future," Murray noted.
"We need in the West Indies Cricket Board and the West Indies Players' Association to address that issue and ensure that it doesn't happen again."
He was overoptimistic in believing that there would be any action from the WIPA. It didn't, after all, involve increased money contracts.
He would surely have expected some response from his own organization but, as a recently appointed director, he might not have appreciated just how inefficient it had become.
It is almost two months since that contentious match and nothing has been heard from the WICB. Not a word. Zilch.
It is not known whether match referee Clarence Shaffralli has lodged his reports. He summoned the Barbados players, captain Ryan Hinds, Floyd Reifer and Dwayne Smith, all West Indies representatives, to a meeting during the match but that's about far as it has gone.
There is enough blame for the state into which West Indies cricket has dipped to go around several times over. WICB weakness deserves more than an even share.