The lost black diamonds

For plenty of Cricket spectators (the purists), there is nothing more pleasing to the eye than a West Indian steaming in and smoke out a batting line up with brutal pace combined with immaculate length and helmet bound short pitch stuffs.
And one need not be from one of the islands situated between two American continents to be an admirer. All of us have grown up listening to stories of fierce bowling prowess that West Indies once possessed. Of Charlie Griffith who hit Nari Contractor that terminated his career. And how the Garners, Holdings , Roberts, Marshals created havoc amongst the best batters of that era.
The lineage didn’t dry up with the mentioned foursome fearsome. Few years later, there was Courtly Ambrose who consistently scared the daylights out of Allan Border in 1990/91 and delayed his tryst with history of becoming the leading run getter in Tests. The troika of Walsh , Cameroon Cuffy and Pattrik Patterson ran through the Indian batting order , rather regularly , on dust bowl Kumble-ish pitches in mid 90s’.
So what happened after that ? When did they all vanish? And where ?
Reports say that the trend among the youth is more to join NBA and thats where the well built lads are heading to. This sounds logical. The players are bound to move to greener pastures if they have choice to make. But didn’t NBA exist in the days of Walsh and Ambrose?
Afterall, they did consistently produced Cameroon Cuffys, Ian Bishops and Keneth Benjamins as replacements to Walsh and Ambrose whenever they didn’t feature in the sqaud for Sarjah Cups.

Few points that touch the crux of problems -

1) West indies is not a country. Its not even like Chinese Tiepeh which participates in all the sports. Cricket is perhaps the only sport they participate as a team. It was created like ‘Third Front’ of Deve gowda / I K Gujral days. May be the idea was to unite the talent of carribean Islands under one umbrella and form a third team to compete with power houses like Australia and England.
Now , with no National Pride at stake , it fails to ignite fire in the belly to fight.
This is the reason why Ireland fights so hard, even if the team is largely full of non professionals. And there have been instances of boycotts in West Indies over trivial issues of pay cheques.

2) To play as ‘Team’ which actually is comprised of players of different nationalities, one needs a charismatic leader to gel the unit together. Unfortunately after the days of Clive Lloyd and Vivian Richards , West indies is still struggling to find one. Darren Sammy is not even like Cortney Walsh.

3) Now then...Whats common among Ottis Gibson, Franklyn Rose, Adam Stanford, Jerme Lawson (please forgive the spelling mistakes in the names , I am writing this from my memory ), Tino Best, Jerome Taylor and Vasbret Drakes ?

They all promised so much and most of them had talent to hit 150 km/ph. They all Invited natural comparisons with their mighty role models during the debut tournaments but hardly played in even couple of series that followed.
Need we have sixth sense to understand, there is something rotting in the system over there?

ICC is too busy forcing BCCI's interests in the game to step into this problem of missing Black Diamonds. We cant hope Mr Haroon Lorgat to do somethig worthwhile , when he calls the stone pelting incident as Pebble throw out of misunderstanding.

I wish one day this problem gets addressed on its own. Until then we can sit back and enjoy some Keemar Roach run through the Bangla batting line up as a duck takes into Water.