West Indies Emerging From A Long Hard Winter

Garfield Robinson analyses the recent series victory against England and outlines the reasons why this should not be considered to be just another false dawn

- Garfield Robinson

Winter, in the popular HBO series Game of thrones, is not just winter as we know it. It is a time of dread, a time of darkness and destruction all round. With winter also comes the possibility of another “long night,” a particularly harsh winter that lasted more than a generation, “when children were born, lived and died, all in darkness …when Kings froze to death in their castles, same as the shepherds in their huts.”

Prior to this England visit West Indies cricket had been enduring a long winter, if you will, where they moved from crisis to crisis and from loss to embarrassing loss. A period marked by acrimony and distrust between senior players and the authorities that manifested itself in public spats, court cases and even an abandoned tour.

During that barren period, players had fairly long careers without experiencing any reasonable run of success. Caribbean cricket was a long time in the doldrums with seemingly little chance of making it out of the ditch into which they had placed themselves. They pulled off a few victories, such as that remarkable win at Headingley in August 2017, and wins over Pakistan in the UAE in November 2016 and a few months later in the Caribbean.

But subsequent returns to wasteful ways showed that those victories were simply the fluctuations in performance that occur over time. On any given day in football’s Premier League, for example, the bottom team can defeat the team at the top. It doesn’t mean the bad team suddenly became good. It just means they played unusually well on that occasion or that the good team played badly. Or, possibly, that luck played a huge part in the outcome.