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BENEATH the azure sky, the waving palms, beside the glittering sea, the Caribbean people are not happy. On beaches, street corners and barstools, they grumble and rant and bicker. Everywhere you can hear their raised voices, see their shaking fists. Their beloved cricket is in tatters and they know it. And now the Australians are here. The first Test begins on Friday.

The omens are not good. Having just returned from their embarrassment in South Africa - the first 5-0 whitewash in their history - the West Indians' confidence is at rock bottom. Depression and melancholy are shackling their natural flamboyance. Team spirit has been ravaged by consistent defeat and ill-discipline, which the irresponsible behaviour of the captain, Brian Lara, only exacerbates. Player power rules. Or, as one Bajan put it: ``The horse is out of the cart and they can't get the horse back.'' Amid much national outrage, Lara narrowly retained his post and is on probation for the first two Tests of the series.

Selecting 10 others to join him will be a lottery. The team's leading fast bowler, Courtney Walsh, is in New York having his ailing body examined by a specialist, the recent vice-captain Carl Hooper remains in Adelaide tending his ill new-born son, Curtly Ambrose - functional now rather than frightening - was injured in late January and hasn't bowled since. There is a long casualty list including Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Dinanth Ramnarine, Franklyn Rose and Lara himself.

And, with Walsh and Ambrose soon to join the 1990s exodus of distinguished players, the future looks bleak. A team of alleged bright, young talent were selected to play against the Australians in Antigua earlier this week. In the first innings they were bowled out for 55 by the military medium of Adam Dale (Glenn McGrath wasn't playing and Shane Warne didn't get on). They fared a little better with the bat second time round, but their fast bowling - Pedro Collins, a poor man's Alan Mullally, and Dwight Mais, a lanky Vanburn Holder - looked ordinary and their spin innocuous. The Calypso anthem Captain Your Ship Is Sinking, such a familiar accompaniment to a sequence of hapless visiting captains leading their teams out here, would now sound more appropriate for Lara taking the field. Dry land looks a long way off.

So recently the rulers of the waves, the West Indies look all washed up. Unbeaten in 15 years and 29 series before going down at home to Australia in 1995, they have lost their three away series since, including all the Tests and six out of seven one-day internationals on the tour of South Africa. Lara, the coach Malcolm Marshall and senior players like Ambrose and Hooper were blamed, but the problems go far deeper than that. Curing the following list of ills might test a United Nations taskforce: No money No discipline No leadership No promotion No ideas No coherence No competitive structure No TV or radio coverage No facilities No opening pairs No wonder the stoop of the manager, Clive Lloyd, is getting more pronounced by the day. ``We've lost the cricket ethic,'' Lloyd said, squashed at the back of a tiny plane flying out of Antigua. ``There's a lack of professionalism, of passion, of pride. We worked very hard for our success when I was captain but you don't see that sort of discipline now. Not many of our boys play in county cricket these days and that was a very good place to learn it.'' (There, English cricket in credit for once, but for the wrong reasons.)

``We've got very complacent,'' he went on, ``and unfortunately, there are too many people involved in The Management of the game who don't have any real knowledge of cricket.'' Lloyd would make an ideal

figurehead or supremo of West Indies cricket, but would only consider such a role, he said, ``if there were some major personnel changes. Immediately.''

The administration of cricket in the Caribbean is hopeless. It was quite right that the West Indies Board should have dropped the words ``of control'' from their title because they relinquished their grip long ago. With no forward thinking or unity in the islands, cricket has been left drifting. There was no investment in facilities or coaching and zero marketing. It was a blueprint for self-destruction.

So where once you saw kids playing cricket on rough recreation areas, they're now playing football, hockey or basketball: the sports they see on American satellite TV. Caribbean-made television is fuzzy and amateurish, and anyway, islands hosting Test matches are not allowed to broadcast them. On one cricket ground in Barbados, I saw youths practising long-jumping, triple-jumping and hurdles, but no one batting or bowling. Scholarships to American universities have made athletics more attractive. Co-education and the spread of women teachers have also had an effect. Some coaching programmes have been initiated but they are slow to take effect.

The consequence is a declining standard of cricket all round. Club matches in Barbados - three-day games played over three successive Saturdays - are ``not really worth watching'', according to the Barbados national coach Bill Bourne

(Warwickshire 1975-79). First-class cricket, now called the Busta Cup, consists of only five matches for each of Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, the Leewards and the Windwards, and is universally regarded as poor.

If Wednesday in Antigua was anything to go by, the younger crop of players don't seem to care all that much. Here was a nucleus of youthful talent ambling to the middle 20 minutes late, often resting on their heels in the field and attempting to slog bowlers like Warne and Stuart MacGill on an awkward pitch almost as soon as they had come in. There were barely 100 people in the ground, which

further emphasised the lack of promotion.

The great West Indian players of the recent past knew the score some time ago, but no one took much notice of them. Desmond Haynes kept underlining the need for a plan to keep West Indies cricket ahead of its

pursuers. ``I warned them that others would start to catch us, but they didn't listen. They just said 'lack of funds'. How could the best team in the world have the poorest board?''

Lloyd suggested the decline in margins of victory during the early 1990s - from 4-0 and 5-0 to 1-0 and 3-2 - should have been warning enough. About that time, Marshall said: ``Everything seems to be going down the drain. There's no respect, no manners.''

Viv Richards, alternating between work in Antigua and acting as a cricket 'consultant' to the Sultan of Brunei's family, has a calm, objective view. ``I always felt we couldn't continue with our run of success. There were going to be problems. For some reason, we became a bit lazy towards the preparation of players to inherit our mantle.''

Richards tells a story about Ambrose which indicates the precariousness of the Caribbean system. ``I happened to see him bowling on a bit of ground near his village one day. I was impressed and I made some inquiries. No one really rated him. I got him into the Leeward Islands team before he'd even played for Antigua. It was a chance discovery.'' Without Richards' intervention, Ambrose could have lain undiscovered (and a hundred Test batsmen would have been able to sleep easier at night).

The West Indies Board's ultimate negligence is to let people of Richards' calibre go. Just think what their presence at schools and clubs and Test grounds might do. Neither he nor Haynes has any role in West Indies cricket, though both would like one (Haynes is actually employed part-time by the England and Wales Cricket Board); Marshall and Lloyd are based in England because they have no permanent status at home. In other words, no one has had the wherewithal to lure them back. It's a bit like the FA employing someone as England manager who lives in America (''Er, Kevin, hop on the 9.30 from JFK will you, something's come up'').

You would need the full regalia of helmet, arm guard, chest pad and ear plugs to be a West Indies Board member at present. They are getting flak from all sides. Andy Roberts, himself a former team manager, let fly this bouncer: ``The West Indies Cricket Board played true to form by demonstrating a lack of guts in re-appointing Brian Lara as captain. We have to get rid of them. They are only concerned with personal ambitions.''

Other quick bowlers like Colin Croft, Wayne Daniel and Winston Benjamin have joined in (it always has to be a four-pronged pace attack, you see), one saying he was deterring his son from playing cricket because of the board's attitude. The Prime Minister of Barbados, Owen Arthur, said: ``The board has not been as decisive as the situation warrants,'' and thought the new directives at Lara to be punctual and well behaved made the whole issue seem childish.

Perhaps this is one of the West Indies' fundamental problems. Everyone has a view and they are not afraid to air it in the strongest possible terms. You are conscious of it at bus stops, in grandstands, at taxi ranks and, no doubt, it is happening in boardrooms. But few seem either willing or able to take remedial action. As usual, the bottom line is money, which the Caricom governments have frequently promised but always failed to deliver (the board made a loss of $267,638 last year). It would certainly help to bond a region that seems to be growing more and more fragmented.

They may need outside help, perhaps from the International Cricket Council. The population is relatively small - Antigua, for instance, has only 70,000 inhabitants and cannot even manage the upkeep of its roads, never mind a state-of-the-art Test-match stadium.

West Indian cricket has given the game so much in skill, vitality and individualism. The exploits of Lloyd, Richards, Holding and Ambrose are indelibly imprinted on spectators' memories, batsmen's crash helmets and bowlers' analyses. But their fading influence is already tempting Channel 4 to ditch the idea of Caribbean-style theme music for next season's domestic coverage.

To crank the game up again, prompt action must be taken, though in a region where the fire engines travel at 20 mph, this is unlikely. They need a more substantial first-class competition of 10 matches a side, full-time coaches travelling with the teams (at the moment only Barbados have this) and proper attention to their facilities. Nets are about as common as frost in the West Indies - the Australians will have to travel to a scruffy local club ground to practise during the Barbados Test - and the pitches are so ropey, there are few first-class totals of more than 200. The concept of floodlit cricket ought to be aired, in spite of the fact that in much of the Caribbean there are barely enough watts to power a hairdryer.

Proper employment for some of the stars of yesteryear - the ones who really care - would be a start. Haynes has a lot to offer on the technical and mental side of the game and his ebullience would win over many sceptics. While fully in support of Lloyd, Richards is dying to add his services on the motivational side to ``help provide the sort of self-esteem that you need at this level''. In other words, to restore a bit of swagger.

Lara might be the first to benefit. He is an isolated figure at present - though he has his supporters - finding solace mainly on the golf course. His disciplinary record of lateness and disappearance is long and his disrespect towards some players intense, much of it caused by inner self-doubt.

His Test average has slipped from above 60 to below 50, he has not scored a century for 13 Tests and despite his imaginative captaincy, half his Tests in charge have been lost. A few runs and a drawn series would be a major step forward.

These are critical months for the West Indies. There are four Tests against the hungry Australians to negotiate and a few one-dayers, promptly followed by the World Cup. It is not a time to feel vulnerable, and remember the West Indies were beaten by Kenya in the last World Cup. ``I do believe some of the players need to take a long look at themselves,'' Richards says, and who are they to argue? It may take more than the attentions of a newly recruited sports psychologist to get the message across, but a bit of harsh treatment from the dejected supporters in the stands might do the trick. For once in the Caribbean, it looks like the home side might be the ones enduring the intimidation.