Just in case the West Indies Cricket Board had plans to take credit for the victory of the men’s team in the World T20 competition, captain Darren Sammy, with the certainty he often shows as a late-order hitter of tremendous power and precision, scuttled the thought from board president Dave Cameron. And he did so before the watching world.
“We had a new manager in this tournament in Rawle Lewis, he had never managed any team before. He came here, we were at a camp in Dubai, but we had no uniforms, no printed … he left Dubai, went to Kolkata, that’s where he started,” said Sammy at the end of his team’s thrilling victory in the 2016 World T20 final yesterday.
Asked by the end-of-match interviewer (Nasser Hussain) to make comparisons between the 2012 first victory of the WI in the T20 championships and yesterday’s, Sammy deliberated for a second before responding. In the end he thought it a grand opportunity to tell it like he and his team must have felt it.
“Disrespected by our board,” was how captain Sammy chose to characterise the relationship between the players and the WICB. To be noted too in the conflict between team and board, the players objected strenuously before the T20 World Cup of the board reducing player pay without consultation with the team.
But Sammy was far from finished with the board, its perceived inefficiencies and its lack of the basic managerial ability to give guidance and inspiration to the team. To do so, the skipper compared the absence of inspirational motivation from the board to that of Caricom prime ministers who have been asking Cameron and his board to leave office.
“I really want to thank the heads of Caricom, throughout this tournament they have been supporting the team, we've got emails, we've got phone calls, Prime Minister [Keith] Mitchell [from Grenada]. He sent a very inspiring email for the team this morning … and I'm yet to hear from our own cricket board. That is very disappointing,” Sammy told the tens of millions watching the telecast all over the cricket-playing world on several continents.
Sammy’s comment seemed a definite intervention in the contention between the Caricom prime ministers, who have asked the board to resign on the basis of a report put forward by a specially appointed committee to examine the way forward for West Indies cricket and the insistence of Cameron and the board that they are not planning to leave anytime soon.
Perhaps predicting a negative response by the Cameron board to his open exposure and denunciation of them, the St Lucian-born former Test captain said his farewell to the 15-member West Indian touring party and coaching staff.
“I don’t know when I’m going to be playing with these guys again because we don’t get selected for one-day cricket,” said Sammy. And he sought to reinforce his criticism of the board by adding that “we (this champion T20 team) don't know when we’re going to be playing T20,” the suggestion being that the board may not be capable of organising series against quality opposing teams notwithstanding the “champion” status of this team.
He had a special word of praise for coach “Phil Simmons, who has gone through quite a lot,” he having been suspended from duties a couple months ago by the board for reporting what he considered to be inappropriate interventions by the board in team selection.
But Sammy did not forget at least one of the critics of the West Indies, who seemed to have engaged in a mind game, or maybe in the mind of Sammy it was traditional antagonism that has long been agitated against the West Indies, and this time it started long before the series got under way in India.
“Mark Nicholas described our team as a team with no brains,” noted Sammy, but making it clear that the team with “no brains” had “the ability to just put all those adversities aside and to come out and play this type of cricket in front of such passionate fans, it's just tremendous.”
Even before Sammy had said his piece to Nicholas, man-of-the match Marlon Samuels singled out former Australian leg-spinner Shane Warner for special attention, donating (with much sarcasm) his award to him: “Shane Warner has been talking continuously and all I have to say without talking, this is for Shane Warne (as he held the trophy as if stretched out to the former leggie) I answer with my bat not with the mike.”
For the future, captain Sammy said the all round performance by several players during the series “shows the depth we have in the Caribbean in T20 cricket and hopefully with the right structure and development our cricket will continue to improve in one-day and Test cricket.”