Problem with West Indies cricket? What problem?

West Indies: masters at the hokey pokey© AFP

That was a good tournament, but it wasn’t a great tournament. There were no shock results, for a start. Call me old-fashioned but a tournament doesn’t come alive until there’s a proper honest-to-goodness, jaw-dropping shocker, of the kind that causes you to spit warm tea all over your copy of the Telegraph and immediately order the butler to gather everyone in the drawing room for an announcement:

“I’m afraid I have to inform you that earlier today, England were defeated by Ireland at cricket. Oh, do stop crying dear, we have to set an example for the staff.”

It was also a bit damp around the edges, but then this soggy corner of the Sri Lankan calendar was the only place where the thing could go, and so it was duly squeezed in like a modestly sized Georgian side table in an already well-stocked second-hand furniture shop.

If last year’s World Cup was a six-week safari, this was more of a rainy fortnight in Wales, but a rainy fortnight in Wales that left us with some memorable highlights. There was the spectacle of the English batsmen hacking away at thin air in the manner of short-sighted lumberjacks. There was Tony Greig bending down to interview Mahela Jayawardene like Santa Claus seeking clarification from a particularly shy little boy. And the image that will stay with me longest: the fearsome sight of Shapoor Zadran charging in, nostrils flared, arms pumping: like Fred Trueman doing a Waqar Younis impression.

And West Indies won, which was pleasing for three reasons:

1. They were the best team.
2. They were the best dancers.
3. I said they would.*

The triumph of West Indies also suggests that perhaps we’d all got it wrong. The problem with Caribbean cricket was not inter-island squabbling, the brain-boggling ineptitude of the WICB, the comic wrangling of TweedleHunte and TweedleRamnarine, or even the lure of basketball, baseball, croquet, macramé, or whatever else was said to be stealing away the nation’s youth from the true path of leather and willow.

No, it turns out all that was needed was a bit of boring old discipline and a spot of unimaginative hard work. So well done to Darren Sammy and Ottis Gibson for stripping the vehicle down, removing the alloy wheels, the expensive chrome accessories and the go-faster stripes, and putting together something altogether more reliable, which may not look as flashy but which doesn’t splutter to a grinding halt every five minutes.

Of course, the sun never sets on T20 cricket, and even before the final fireworks had fizzled to earth in Colombo, elsewhere, on a different continent, the place names were being laid out for the opening press conference of the next all-star extravaganza. On Sunday it’s West Indies versus Sri Lanka; on Tuesday, say hello Yorkshire and Uva Next, featuring Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Jacob Oram, Hilary Clinton, Yohan Blake, and Jay Z.

We need some excuse-making coaches here

"How do you expect me to play at my best when these raindrops keep fallin' on my head and turnin' my eyes red?"© Getty Images

The modern-day proliferation of backroom flunkies is often portrayed as a bad thing. Ex-pros who can remember a time when an international cricketer had to wash his own underpants sometimes appear bewildered by this state of affairs. Does Team England really need 27 chiropractors, a battalion of soup testers and a crack team of water-alkalinity troubleshooters?

Well, yes, they do. Thanks to this army of advisors, counsellors and hangers-on, the modern cricketer is able to sidestep countless traps and pitfalls, that, if left to stumble along without guidance, they would undoubtedly blunder straight into.

For instance, thanks to the work of nutritionists, the modern cricketer understands that eating three pigeon pies and a portion of battered chocolate for breakfast will not help him perform to his best. Thanks to integrity consultants he’s discovered that being paid to fix cricket matches is wrong. And thanks to the efforts of fashion advisors, he understands that tattoos make him look more manly and emphasise his individuality.

That said, there is still room for improvement on the media-handling front. The tendency for Australians to preface every comment with the phrase, “Ah, look…” has yet to be eradicated. Despite the best efforts of elocution coaches, the post-match interviews of many cricketers from the north of England remain unintelligible. And then there are the terrible excuses.

Excuses are as much part of the modern game as photo shoots, silly sunglasses and forgetting which franchise you are supposed to be playing for this week. Yet so many cricketers appear reluctant to put in the hard yards and improve their justificatory skills. Take Dimitri Mascarenhas. Under pressure to explain Hampshire’s one day one-day campaign at the Champions Thingy in South Africa, this was all he could come up with:

“When we saw the pitch yesterday, we thought there was no way we could play on that wicket.”

Really? Was it strewn with bear traps? Were tarantulas nesting in the popping crease? Were the wildebeest migrating via Centurion again? No. It turns out that the pitch was a bit damp.

"In 20-over cricket, you want a flat wicket.”

Speak for yourself, old chap. Personally, the only thing I want from a 20-over game is for the players to turn up, the seats to be relatively comfy and the music not too dated. Beyond that, I have no expectations pitch-wise. Soggy or dusty, it makes no difference to me. I don’t measure my enjoyment by the length of the affair; a 14-over wicket fest can be just as much fun as a 20-over six-hitting contest.

It seems the more you pay a sportsman the more fussy he becomes about the going. I can only imagine the horrified reactions of the modern cricketer if he were asked to play on an uncovered wicket. I suspect some of them might faint. It’s even worse in Test cricket. Slippery run-ups, a hint of fog, a bit of drizzle, a swarm of bees: there’s no end to the minor inconveniences that can be used as a pretext not to do the thing they are paid to do.

“The most disappointing thing is that it was all in the toss. It was decided on that.”

Well, not quite, Dmitri. It was decided on the fact that Auckland scored all the runs you got, plus two more, on the same unplayable pitch that you were complaining about an hour earlier. Never mind awards dinners, charity speaking engagements and winter nets, I suggest you spend this close season increasing your excuse-making repertoire working for one of England’s many splendid rail franchises.