TROUBLE IN PARADISE?are these the end days of West Indies cricket?

Horatio Nembhard speaks for a generation at the boundary’s edge. “Clive Lloyd is my legend. The Big Cat was something special. And what the players did down in India, that was rubbish. Stupid! But Clive Lloyd [now back with the West Indies Cricket Board as chairman of selectors] can’t manage them. They’ve got too much money.”

Nembhard – or ‘Jumbo’ as he is known around here – is steeped in cricket. After emigrating he spent most of the Eighties and Nineties playing for various clubs in England (where, after making a hundred with the Viv Richards-endorsed SS Jumbo bat, he was given his enduring nickname), before returning home to St. Elizabeth, a rural parish in south Jamaica, where he is a well-known coach and league administrator. AOC meets him during a 20-over cup match that he has organised, at a local charity-sponsored ground in a small, quiet area called Treasure Beach on the island’s south-west coast. Like so many of his generation who I ask about the health of the game in the Caribbean, Jumbo’s negotiation of optimism and pessimism is a battle of heart and head.

“These guys got loads of money so they don’t respect the cricket no more. I always tell the kids I coach: the game is bigger than the player. But what happened in the West Indies is the player got bigger than the game. When one man says he’s not going on tour because him don’t have to play no white-suit game no more, because him can go to India and play four games and come back with millions, what you gonna do? You can’t control him. He’s uncontrollable. Because money is the thing they play for and he has loads of it. He could pay you!”


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