The Editor, Sir:

The end of another West Indian batting collapse, and many curse words come out of my mouth, as I feel to blame everyone and everything. I am a disappointed man, and turn on the news the same night, and hear reports of murder, political corruption, social injustice and a questionable economy, and I for a second think that the loss in the cricket match is but a small shrub, compared to the bush of problems in my life and the life of my country.

The small shrub of the loss of the West Indies grows on the same landscape as all other problems. The ills of the society and the ills of the West Indian cricket team all relate.

The growing materialism, lack of respect for history, lack of traditional values, complacent leadership, island insularity and societal indiscipline are all tools which have torn apart our society, and also West Indies cricket.

Challenges

We have had challenges in the past; the goal of decolonisation created a united sprit across the islands for a case of political freedom in structure and in the style our players that represented us.

I feel somewhere along the line - in our politics and in our cricket - we have lost a general vision of what we stand for in the wide world.

We have lost an ideological premise on which we stand. We have lost something, which I think we had. Lost a general passion and pride which fuelled effort and motivation to do the things we need to do.

The world is our competition in the free market and on the cricket pitch; they, whether through an equitable or inequitable way, have gone ahead of us. No excuses are needed now.

We need to find a new ideology which fuelled emancipation efforts, the songs of Bob Marley, the bold strokes of Viv Richards and the spirit of decolonisation.

We have our freedom; let us now find a new way to express ourselves in cricket and in the wider globalised world.

I am, etc.,

MARK PIKE

xtraboy2001@hotmail.com

62 Ward Avenue

Mandeville

Via Go-Jamaica

'We need to find a new ideology which fuelled emancipation efforts, the songs of Bob Marley, the bold strokes of Viv Richards and the spirit of decolonisation.'