MAYBE I'm so far removed from the modern-day game that I'm at a loss as to what is needed to build body and mind for the active purpose of participating in cricket at the highest level for the sole purpose of winning the match for which we're preparing. There are many, many theories put forward as to the reasons for the demise of the West Indies as a powerful cricket region, by minds far more brilliant than mine.
However, I'll stick to my simple formula of how to play cricket and be a winner.
In a nutshell, for any sportsman to advance by improving his game, regardless of whatever sport it is, one factor stands out and that is practice. Every sportsman repeats this virtue as an absolute necessity.
From 1928, when our group of British West Indian islands were recognised by the cricket lords of the Marylebone Cricket Club to be interested enough in the game of cricket, with a surprising ability to play the game, the West Indies were granted Test status with the privilege to engage England and Australia at Test cricket.
When spin bowlers toppled the might of England in 1950 in England, the WI had been recognised as having arrived as a top-class cricket region.
As they see-sawed throughout the years even whipping Australia for the first time in 1965, the best was yet to come.
Kerry Packer ensured the improved cricket by his WI players by threatening to sack them.
The players then arranged to work on their game, firstly, improving their fitness by hiring Danis Waite, the Australian fitness expert. Secondly, longer hours of practice sessions were introduced because players needed to be super fit. After those lessons, WI players understood what it meant to be professional sportsmen.
Their first defeat in a series between 1980 and 1995, playing almost every year, was in 1995 in a four-Test series in the Caribbean, when they collapsed to Mark Taylor's Australians by an innings, in Jamaica in the 4th Test, giving the Aussies a 2-1 series victory.
In 1998/99, WI were set to tour South Africa, a country the team never officially visited because of that country's segregation apartheid laws.
The WI team, with Brian Lara as captain and Courtney Walsh as his vice-captain, Clive Lloyd as manager, created history, having a stand-off of the WI squad en route on the tour, in a hotel in London.
This protest was for more money and better conditions. West Indian Cricket Board officials flew to London to sort out the problem. They fired Lara and Walsh, soon to be reinstated when Nelson Mandela informed the WICB; no Lara, no tour. The WICB succumbed to this demand and the tour was on.
Lara's team missed the preparation of the team to take place in South Africa in the first two weeks of the tour and went straight into the scheduled games without the benefit of acclimatising to the pitches or the climate of a country which they had never visited before.
WI lost all five Test matches in the series.
The first time that indignity was ever suffered by the proud cricketing islands of the Caribbean. In t
