Australia needs to learn from the Windies: play the kids or perish

A long time ago in a tropical archipelago far, far away, the West Indies cricket team was being knitted together by a languid slip of a man.

Frank Worrell had taken over the captaincy from wicketkeeper-batsman Gerry Alexander and had begun moulding a group of players made up of nations separated by flight paths.

Barbadians would associate with Barbadians, as would the Trinidadians, Jamaicans and Guyanans. Before he took the reins his was a team divided.

“There was no allowance for the original point of view,” Worrell said of his harsh school years.

The new captain was not having any of that in his new inclusive Windies order. His mantra was “one in all in”.

His team had recently lost two of the three Ws to retirement in Clyde Walcott and Everton Weekes. Along with Worrell they had formed the most powerful middle-order combination of the time and were irreplaceable.

Sound familiar?

Cricket had become a borefest. Indeed, the West Indians had just come off a home series against England in which the visitors had claimed the series 1-0 with four draws.

Before the 1960-61 tour of Australia, Sir Donald Bradman urged opposing captains Richie Benaud and Worrell to play attacking cricket. They took his advice to heart and produced a pulsating tie in Brisbane, the first of only two in Test history.

The series captured the public’s imagination like never before.

The unprecedented interest saw the Caribbean tourists farewelled with a ticker tape parade by the Melbourne public, only after the Boxing Day turnstiles rattled along to the tune of 90,800 adoring fans – a record that stood for 52 years until the Ashes Test of 2013 where 91,092 people crammed into the modern version of the same stadium.

The Australians won the 1960-61 series 2-1 and the West Indians had a taste of how cricket could really be played.

With players of the ilk of Gary Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Conrad Hunte, Lance Gibbs and Wes Hall, Worrell’s men swept India at home 5-0 then travelled to England in 1963 and won 3-1.

Worrell retired after that tour and handed the captaincy to Sobers, whose side defeated Bob Simpson’s Australians 2-1 in the 1964-65 Caribbean series.

More series wins away against England and India followed. A level of excellence had been established and the West Indies were on top of the world.

Travelling the world as freewheeling ‘Calypso Kings’, they operated with a ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ philosophy and the composition of the team remained consistent. For years.

Sound familiar?

A month after the team returned from yet another series victory in India in 1967, Worrell died in hospital of leukaemia at the age of 42.

With the outpouring of grief in the Caribbean and the unprecedented memorial service for a cricketer at Westminster Abbey, West Indian cricket disappeared into a black hole of mourning.

Over the next nine series, under the leadership of Sobers and Kanhai, the West Indians would win just four Tests on the way to losing five trophies.

Something had to give and it was under the stewardship of the ‘Supercat’ Clive Lloyd that the older players who had had their time were swept aside.

A new breed of attacking batsmen were introduced, including Viv Richards, Roy Fredericks and Gordon Greenidge along with a budding pace battery led by a young Andy Roberts and Vanburn Holder.

Lloyd’s men travelled to India where they won the series 3-2. They then went on to England in 1975 where they defeated Australia in the first World Cup, which was then a 60-over affair.

The Windies followed Australia south for a six-Test series where they found Ian Chappell’s side waiting for them with what proved to be a blueprint for West Indian cricket.

Bloodthirsty firebrands Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, supported by Gary Gilmour and Max Walker, spearheaded a hostile 5-1 thrashing.

Lloyd was convinced of the effectiveness of “three or four quick bowlers on your side”.

In the superb documentary Fire In Babylon he admitted that every West Indian had “at some time or other felt the pain of a cricket ball, sent down at great speed, thudding into their bodies”.

They were “determined never to let it happen again”.

Lloyd scoured the islands of the Caribbean and picked bowlers who could let the ball go at hellish pace, bowlers who had no compassion for the plight of the flesh and bone at the other end. Malevolent demon quicks.

There was no let up. Lloyd and his successor Richards bowled them in tandem and when the batsmen had seen off one tearaway bowling at 90 mph and pitching them more often than not in the bowler’s half of the wicket, another one came on.

All innings. All day. And the production line appeared to have no end: Roberts, Colin Croft, Joel Garner, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Patrick Patterson, Ian Bishop, Winston Benjamin, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, and so on.

The Caribbean batsmen were as good as the era saw too. Richards, Lloyd, Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Richie Richardson, Brian Lara, Carl Hooper and even little Gus Logie took on the bowlers of the time with contempt.

Confidence is the key to an all-powerful side. It pervades the minds of all of a team’s members and infiltrates an opponent’s dressing room.

The ‘new Calypso Kings’ swaggered their way through the 1980s. In their 82 Tests that decade, the Windies won 43 and lost just eight as 16 fast bowlers gathered 1,257 wickets.

From February 1980 and March 1995, they went unbeaten in a Test series and were considered to be a dynasty that would not end.

But of course all dynasties end. Richards, Greenidge, Marshall and Logie retired in 1991, Patterson in 1992 and Haynes followed in 1994.

Sound familiar?

By the time Mark Taylor’s squad, described by opposing captain Richie Richardson as the “weakest Australian team I’ve played against” ended the West Indies reign in the Caribbean in 1995, many of the great names were gone.

As was the Sir Frank Worrell Trophy, and by year’s end so was Richardson.

Young guns had not been infused into the line-up. There were still great players in the side but West Indian youth had not been given the opportunity to gradually knit with the champions of the golden era.

As former Victorian fast bowler Dirk Nannes wrote, “a great young player is historically born from a dressing room with a wealth of knowledge. They have served an apprenticeship in a strong team, as the baby in a team of experienced players.”

The West Indian Test team has never recovered, winning just 39 of the ensuing 185 Tests, a winning record of just 21.1% of matches played.

With the advent of Twenty20 cricket mercenaries, a dearth of modern day role models and the lure of other sports, the ‘Calypso Kings’ may never reign supreme again.

Sound familiar?

With the retirements of the guts of the best Australian combination in history and no young blood, sans Michael Clarke, to fill the breach, Test cricket in this country nosedived into an abyss.

There is no point in running over old ground here – suffice it to say the early 2013 hammering in India provided a resounding punctuation mark to what was the lowest ebb for decades.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to a 5-0 Ashes victory. Cricket Australia began to get its ducks in a row, ‘began’ being the operative word.

Hard-nosed personnel, comprising blokes who called a spade a shovel and were well adept at celebrating a win properly, were called into the Australian dressing room. A relatively clever and considered 2013-14 domestic fixture was drafted.

And, right or wrong, for better or worse, angst was served up to the shell-shocked English like so many Mitchell Johnson bumpers with ‘angry’ pills popped like vitamins.

Yet while the deck chairs on the Titanic may well have been reshuffled and the iceberg avoided presently, regardless of what transpires in South Africa this month, the elephant in the room remains – “What next?”

A number of the recommendations of The Argus Report have been ignored in many ways while others have been taken on board and rejected like a dodgy kidney.

However, largely through necessity, succession planning has not been a priority despite the report declaring: “There was significant negative feedback from numerous stakeholders about our selection function. The evidence also shows that we have not handled succession planning well.”

So despite a report detailing where Cricket Australia had got it all so wrong and the once invincible West Indies providing a template of how not to keep your dynasty humming seamlessly, Australia’s ‘next generation’ batsmen in recent times have been restricted to David Warner, Steve Smith and the Phil Hughes yo-yo.

With the failure of the George Bailey experiment (what a great name for a band!) and the all-too-familiar soft tissue injury to Shaun Marsh, the selectors hand has hopefully been forced.

It is to be hoped that in short time, as is the case with Australian fast bowling stocks, we will be discussing names such as Nic Maddinson, Jordan Silk, Chris Lynn, Peter Handscomb and Travis Head in terms of Test batting depth rather than potential riches.