Don't blame the captain, see the big picture

Ordinarily, a whitewashed team could reasonably expect that its leader would be pressured to resign. But these are not ordinary times.

This extraordinary West Indies team has not yet acquired the level of maturity, experience or competence required for it to be assessed by the usual benchmarks. Yet that is the ballpark in which they play. (It is even more challenging when most indigenous commentators set their standards on the great team of the '80s.) These youngsters are fledglings in every aspect: outlook, savvy and mental discipline. Unless that is factored into planning, the results will continue to traumatise. The talent is there to behold in brilliant bursts, but it remains raw and unharnessed because there is no programme to refine it.

There is no evidence that cricket development as a concept occupies any specially privileged position in the cricket hierarchy of the West Indies. So little attention is given to the need for a comprehensive and coherent plan to rebuild West Indies cricket that when the disappointments come, it is easier to point fingers at individuals than to critique a system.

Indeed, given the highly political structures that administer cricket, it might have been deemed an advantage to have no tangible plan to be assessed.

The horror of an England whitewash may have provoked the cry for Brian Lara's head, but to succumb to it is only to be looping back into that terrible cycle which has been particularly destructive to West Indies cricket. Beheading an individual may bring some grim satisfaction in bloodthirsty moments but, then what? What will it do for the process of development? What did it do when we removed Richardson, Walsh, or Adams?

To remove Lara now is to renege on the implicit promise of support in returning the captaincy to him. Not that it is about him - it is about committing to investment in West Indies cricket. Wasn't it accepted that chopping and changing players (and captains) so often was not producing desired results? Wasn't it understood that there could be no overnight success? True, some of the losses have been devastating and shameful, but Lara's tenure has not been marked by more losses than his predecessors of the last decade. It has been marked by more personal attacks on him. Players, administrators and commentators have always reserved extra dollops of attention for him, usually in the form of bouncers.

Perhaps this is the real problem of his captaincy. Perhaps it is easier to focus on this individual rather than to examine the big picture.

Off the cuff, it's easy to spot fielding weaknesses, short attention spans, injudicious strokes, repeated errors, all of which fall under the coach's purview. Doesn't the coach have sessions with them on these issues? Is the coach equipped to have such sessions? Word is that because so little regard is given to indigenous figures of authority the coaching position is now going to a foreigner. Perhaps soon the West Indies team will be locked inside its own bubble too.

Has the captain been given support from within the West Indian board? Has his position been undermined by the calls for his head coming from respected commentators? Ramnaresh Sarwan, his boyish impetuosity still uncurbed, finds himself heir apparent to a thorny throne. Can he resist the allure? The probability of his career being ruined by a premature captaincy is too great a risk, but one that is not being contemplated in the rush of blood.

The argument that encourages us to look around at other Test teams and see how young their players have been, does not take into account the strength of the programmes developing them. An English player coming out of his training programme is at an entirely different level from a West Indian. Steve Harmison's stint at the ECB Academy transformed his wobbly run into a smooth, straight trajectory that enabled more control over the line and length of the delivery. It took time, but there was a nurturing environment, and coach and captain were consulted before taking decisions.

West Indies cricket does not operate within a nurturing framework, unless you consider providing access to flashy lifestyles as nurturing. Young boys are uprooted and thrust into alien lives without any guides. It is no wonder that the youngsters dazzle until their first pay-cheques, and then they seem to trip off somewhere before they come back down to earth. What is there to prepare them? Obviously they need more time than imagined for them to grow.

The point is that to blame Lara alone for the dismal performances is to perpetuate the problem. For too long we have let West Indies cricket be a one-man show, and it is time we recognise that cricket is a team game requiring support from many levels. Team members are not just the cricketers on the field, it is the management as well; a concept alien to them.

Maybe Lara captains a team that has lost games, but I don't think it is a losing team. Whether it becomes a winning unit depends on how much we are prepared to invest in building it.