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.