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Yet another overseas tour has blessedly come to an end, putting the West Indies team and those of us who still hoped against hope for some late spark, out of our nightly misery.

At least they ended not with a whimper but a bang, even if not with a victory but with another loss. It did the heart good to see Wavell Hinds, Ricardo Powell, Marlon Samuels and Ridley Jacobs smashing the same Australians who had bossed them around all season all over the MCG and to know that their highest total of the tournament was amassed without a run from Brian Lara on whom everything always seems to depend.

Yet the stark reality was that every single match against Australia and the only two against the states were lost, in three days, four days, five days and, latterly, in one day.

No West Indies team, not even the pioneers of 1930-31, had ever returned from Australia without the consolation of at least one Test victory. None, certainly, had been so thoroughly outclassed.

Sadly, it is not new. Pakistan in 1997 also brought defeat in every Test and One-Day International as did New Zealand a year ago. A solitary One-Day win in South Africa 1998-99 was insignificant against defeats in all five Tests and the other six One-Day encounters.

The reasons for such disasters are obvious and repeatedly identified.

Looking back over reports from a variety of sources over the relevant tours, the same phrases recur. General slackness, ineffective leadership, lack of preparation, indiscipline, physical unfitness, mental weakness, yet nothing has been done to correct such negligence by those charged with the authority to look after our cricket.

With a home series against South Africa less than a month away, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has to read the riot act to everyone involved, captain, players, coaches, manager, trainer, as it did to Brian Lara following the calamitous trip to South Africa two years ago.

It then publicly castigated Lara and, to a lesser extent, manager Clive Lloyd and coach Malcolm Marshall, charging Lara to "make significant improvement in his leadership skills," and placing him on probation for two Tests.

The effect was to produce two of the greatest innings the game has known and a share of the series with very much the same Australians who have walked all over the West Indies these past three months.

On behalf of the West Indian cricket community it represents, the WICB must demand more intensive training and practice sessions than those that were so justifiably derided by the Australians. And it has to make it plain that it will get rid of backsliders and prima donnas who can be such disruptive influences.

As Samuels, Hinds and Ramnaresh Sarwan have proved in the past year, there is a foundation of youthful talent on which to build. More young players are playing in the Busta Series than ever before – 19 teenagers at current count – and it is evident that several have the potential to become part of a West Indian revival.

But it is potential that has to be harnessed through the disciplines that made the West Indies once so strong and are now rigidly adhered to by the Australians, South Africans and English.

© The Barbados Nation