West Indies from kings to clowns
They were once the world’s deadliest cricket team. With a battery of lethal pace bowlers and an A-list of batting stylists, the West Indies were kings.
But 30 years after their first World Cup triumph, they are in deep trouble thanks to an unseemly row between skipper Brian Lara and six of his team-mates and the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB).
As always, money is at the centre of the fall-out with Lara, the world record holder of the highest Test score, and his gang of six, dropped from the squad for the upcoming series against South Africa and Pakistan because their individual contracts were seen to be in conflict with the board’s principal backer.
But the game in the West Indies, where the World Cup is to be staged in 2007, has been in decline for a decade ever since a series loss to Australia in 1995 – their first in 16 years.
From that point to 2000, another 16 matches were lost while, in 2004, England won their first series in Caribbean in 35 years.
The onset of the rot was hastened when Curtley Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, the last two products of the conveyor belt of great fast bowlers retired to be replaced by a long line of mediocre trundlers.
‘It was taken for granted because we were so successful,’ said Walsh who retired with 519 Test wickets.
‘I don’t think any infrastructure was in place for when the crunch came and the quality wasn’t there anymore.’
A lack of success on the field has caused many youngsters in the Caribbean to turn away from cricket with them seeking out more lucrative careers in basketball and football – it can’t be a coincidence that Jamaica’s soccer players qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 1998.
Poor performances on the field, and some poor pitches on which to perform, have also increased the bickering amongst the various disparate islands.
‘Apart from cricket, everything we do is done as individual countries,’ said Jimmy Adams, one of a series of captains who have tried to rekindle the legend in recent years.
‘We have our own flags, our own currencies. People tend to lump us all together as the West Indies but culturally there are huge differences between the islands.’
Of the current team, only Lara, whose 400 against England last year meant he reclaimed the record for the highest ever individual Test score, would be assured of a place in any international XI.
But even then, selectors may hesitate to opt for a man whose history of dealing with officials has unsettled numerous teams down the years.
In 1995, Lara was fined 10-percent of his earnings for absenting himself from a tour of England while, in 1998, in a mood of rebellion, members of the team were marooned at a London hotel as arguments over pay delayed the departure to South Africa.
Lara was captain then as is he now having retaken the reins after the 2003 World Cup.
But the crisis has continued.
The row over players contracted to Cable and Wireless and the board, who are now backed by rival telecom firm Digicel to the tune of $15 million over five years, overshadowed the build-up to the tour of Australia at the start of the year.
The board had to find $100,000 of its own money to get the team out to Australia where it won just one match.
On their return, a leaked memo suggested that many of the team had paid more attention to Australian women than to opponents on the field.
That accusation has fuelled the current round of bitter in-fighting where the board is at loggerheads with the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA) over central contracts and match fees.
The board has proposed a top pay bracket of just under $80,000 a year while the WIPA have insisted upon $110,000.
Lara as well as Ramnaresh Sarwan, Chris Gayle, Fidel Edwards, Dwayne Bravo, Dwayne Smith and Ravi Rampaul were all missing from the list of 22 players named by the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) for the series against South Africa which starts on March 31.
Lara said he was confident that the row could be resolved.
‘If I can help, I am prepared to speak to anyone, anywhere and at any time, but positive action is needed now,’ said the 35-year-old.
There is another legacy to the mess – the prospects of the 2007 World Cup going ahead.
‘Broadcasters and potential sponsors will be looking at this and thinking: “If the WICB can’t keep their own house in order, what chance have they got with the World Cup?” ’ Richard Bevan, the joint chief executive of the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations, told the London Daily Telegraph.
— AFP
A gaffer who set genius free
The death of Rinus Michels gave birth on every continent where soccer is played to the debate on Total Football.
Many obituaries in numerous languages described Michels, who died Thursday after heart surgery at the age of 77, as the Founder of Total Football. But, without quibbling with the award FIFA, the international ruler of soccer gave him in 1999 as the ‘Manager of the Century,’ it would be more accurate to say that he was the father of the Dutch version of so-called Total Football.
He didn’t invent the genius of Johan Cruyff, the player synonymous with his teams. He didn’t devise a system that required above average soccer intelligence, adaptability and expression from players in all parts of the team.
It grew on the streets of Amsterdam and Utrecht, and in the traffic free environment of Surinam in the Dutch East Indies where extraordinarily imaginative players were
What Michels, a former center forward and physical educator did, was to take the quarrelsome, opinionated Dutch, to recognise the intelligence in their heads as well as the talents in their feet, and to give them liberty with order. They were subjected to his rigorous training regimens, four times a day, but in return they had freedom to perform
It was the most pleasing soccer that many of us can remember watching, but not as systematic as the archivists suggest, and not always victorious. And also not entirely invented in the Netherlands.
In the 1930s, the Austrian Wunderteam, under Hugo Meisl, apparently played with such improvisation that opponents could not work it out. It was called ‘The Whirl.’ Willy Meisl, the brother of the man who gave Austria such inspiration, wrote a book in 1955 which could have been Michels’ philosophy in print.
‘We must free our soccer youth from the shackles of playing to order, along rails as it were,’ wrote the younger Meisl. ‘We must give them ideas and encourage them to develop their own.’
Nils Middleboe, a banker and an amateur player with Chelsea between 1913 and 1922, also wrote marvelously about the subject. ‘To systematise,’ he insisted, ‘is to sterilise.’
The same theme, the examples of men of free mind in athletic bodies has been played down the ages, from the breathtaking interchanging of the Magical Magyars, the Hungarians led by Ferenc Puskas in the early 1950s, to the wondrously free-wheeling Real Madrid team built around Alfredo di Stefano later in the same decade.
Marinus Hendrikus Jacobus Michels, was born in February 1928 within sight of the old Olympic Stadium that housed the Ajax club. He matured in the 1950s. On his debut for Ajax, he scored five times as an 18-year-old, and when he became trainer to the Ajax team he promptly recognised and installed the 17-year-old Cruyff as his playmaker.
Cruyff, paying tribute to his first mentor, said this week that he never learned so much from one man as he did from Michels. But the trainer did not put the concept of total football, free expression into Cruyff. That was innate. It too grew on the very steps of the stadium where Michels played and where Cruyff’s mother was a cleaner.
This player-coach interdependence is intrinsic to everything that is said and written in the floods of tributes to Michels. The trainer could be strict, tough, taciturn. The players did what he said in terms of preparation – up to a point.
Rebellious ones, such as Piet Keizer had their parties, their late night drinking. Michels knew about them, understood human beings and even encouraged ‘family days’ when at big tournaments wives and girlfriends were allowed in when Michels felt it correct to open the gates.
This, too, was not unique to the Dutch. Ask the Brazilians – accustomed to their long, secluded training camps on the mountain of Teresopolis in the 1950s and 1970s – about training encampment and ‘freedom’ days.
With Michels in charge, with Cruyff exercising the concept on the field, the Dutch bewildered all opponents in the 1974 World Cup – up to the final in Munich which they lost to West Germany.
Franz Beckenbauer, who under the German coach, Helmut Schön, enjoyed similar rights to invent as the game evolved, memorably said that the Total Football label used to describe Holland was not all that it seemed.
‘It owed more to the element of surprise than to any magic formula,’ he said. ‘I think the Dutch got away with it for so long because the opposition could not work out what tactics they were facing.
‘It never dawned on them, certainly not until it was too late, that there were no tactics at all,’ Beckenbauer said. ‘Just brilliant players with a ball.’
Brilliant players, given licence by a coach they called The General. Germany suppressed the Dutch in 1974 but Michels did lead the next generation of Dutchmen to the 1988 European title.
Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard were the stars. The trio was employed by AC Milan whose paymaster Silvio Berlusconi, more than any coach, chose who would represent his club. Berlusconi, with no managerial training in soccer knew what Michels knew: Find the talent, and let it play. The system, if there is one, will follow.
Michels enjoyed, and deserved, the status of doyen among European coaches. And in 1999, after an astonishing Champions League final was turned on its head in the last few minutes when Manchester United beat Bayern Munich, Michels and the UEFA team of coaching experts had to analyse the performance and the styles.
I happened to walk from the stadium to the hotel with Michels that night. ‘Did you ever, in all your years in soccer, have such a lucky, inexplicable turn of events?’ I asked.
Michels thought then replied: ‘Ah, yes. In my dreams.’ Sweet dreams, maes
— International Herald Tribune
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