The degeneration of West Indies cricket has been so numbingly steep that their era of invulnerability, spanning two decades beginning in the ’70s and stretching into every outpost of the sport, resembles a glorious accident of fate.On either side of their golden era, powered by the phalanx of artfully nasty quicks, gracefully powerful batsmen and captains that forged a chain of unity from scattered islands in the Caribbean Sea, their performances have fluctuated from sporadically thrilling to distressingly hideous, plummeting often to new depths.The reasons are myriad and complex, ever-changing and never-resolving, always teetering from one shore of ignominy to the other. With India whitewashing West Indies with a 2-0 win in the bilateral Test Series in New Delhi on Tuesday (October 14), we trace the once-formidable West Indies team’s decline.Fall from graceThe decay has been bewildering in the last 15 years. From 2010, West Indies have won only 33 of the 127 Tests (away record is an abysmal 11 wins from 61 games). They have not beaten India (the last win came in 2002) or South Africa (2007) in this period; they mustered a solitary victory over Australia and Sri Lanka.They inevitably put on inspired shows against England (6-11 trailing still) and Pakistan (5-7), but against the rest of the cricketing world, they flounder like tents in hurricanes, a familiar calamity in the Caribbean islands. For years, intermittent success in white-ball cricket soothed their pain (two T20 titles and Champions Trophy), but they failed to qualify for the 2023 edition of the 50-over World Cup as well as the 2022 instalment of the T20 World Cup.By virtue of being co-hosts, they entered the 2024 edition but stumbled in the Super Eights. Recently, they lost a series to minnows Nepal. Chris Gayle is the last batsman to have averaged 40 while also scoring more than 1,000 runs for his country. Only Kemar Roach has grabbed more than 100 wickets at a sub-30 average since Curtly Ambrose and Walsh retired.Offers from basketball, athletics, footballStory continues below this adEverything that could be blamed has already been blamed. The first villain was basketball, luring the finest with the prosperous winds of the American National Basketball Association (NBA), just across the Gulf of Mexico.Next came athletics, a theory that gathered strength with Usain Bolt (who played club cricket in his teenage years) and others from Jamaica — once the nursery of fast bowlers, the home of Michael Holding, Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson. “Athletics is a more rewarding profession, less headache, less politics,” former West Indies fast bowler Winston Benjamin once told this daily. His son Rai is an Olympic champion in 400 m hurdles. Reigning javelin world champion Keshron Walcott, too, had inclinations towards cricket before he switched tracks.Don't miss | ‘It’s like a cancer that’s already in the system’: Head coach Darren Sammy on decline in Windies Test cricketFootball also had a cameo, especially when Dwight Yorke, from Trinidad, was hitting the high notes of fame. “But to put all the blame on other sports is merely an excuse,” legendary fast bowler Andy Roberts would tell this newspaper. “West Indies cricket had to look within to find the solutions. Nothing was ever done to nurture the talent that we had coming up. The administrators failed to address the decay that had been setting in from the mid-90s”, he added. It has metastasised into full-blown cancer.The West Indies population has always been around five lakhs, with constant migration to the US or the UK. It’s little wonder that sportsmen of Caribbean origins feature prominently in US athletics or English football (Cole Palmer, Ollie Watkins, Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford, to name a few). England cricketers Jofra Archer and Jacob Bethell were literally priced out of Barbados.14 captains, 10 coaches, chaotic boardStory continues below this adThe revolving door of West Indies cricket administration, on the pitch as well as in the boardroom, has been as fickle and tempestuous as the Caribbean weather. Since the turn of the century, they have appointed 14 different captains in Tests alone (19 in ODIs and 17 in T20Is), with several serving more than once in this span.The policy was repeated in the board’s faith with coaches. Ten were assigned full-time to revive West Indies cricket (six interims too). The last to serve was Phil Simmons (2019-22). Some of them, both captains and coaches, resigned, but most were ousted. It was an impossible job, made more difficult by players rebelling for increased wages, feuding for power, and an unstable administrative core that was hampered as much by paucity of practical ideas as by the greed to make money.The impasse between the board and the players’ rebel organisation was a recurrent feature till the turn of this decade. Players complained that the administrators, largely bereft of cricketing experience, lacked the foresight to revive first-class cricket, improve the quality of pitches, or the standard of cricket.The board is structured in the same way as it has been since 1927, comprising representatives from the West Indies Cricket Board’s (WICB) six members, each with two votes. The two directors from each territory end up wielding a lot of power.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Brian Lara says West Indies no longer on ‘same level-playing field’, calls for need to examine young players’ motivation, interestsThen there is the WICB championship. The regional first-class fixtures don’t exude the glamour of the old Shell Shield or the Busta Cup. Most of the pitches are sluggish, with slow outfields, neither breeding top-class batters nor high-grade seamers.Million-dollar armsSunil Gavaskar, in his column for Mid Day, pointed out that the central contract system in the West Indies was self-destructive. “The question therefore arises whether hunger is dulled by guaranteed income because of central contracts. Would doubling or trebling of match fees and doing away with guaranteed contract money do the trick? If the players can also be given more for every 10 or 15 Test matches that they play, it could be an incentive to give a bigger try than the listless efforts that are generally seen with guaranteed contract income,” he wrote.As intuitive as his suggestion is, it could risk players turning even more from the red-ball game. They could forsake the game completely, for it is no longer the shared Caribbean pride that’s fuelling them, but the drive to make money to make ends meet. Brian Lara recently posed the rhetorical question to Chase and Co: “Do Chase and the other guys have cricket in the heart? Do they really want to play for the West Indies?” It’s the everyday reality of the tourism-dependent economy — to make money if and when it’s there.The best of them, scattered in the T20 leagues of the world, have already wedded to the neo-reality. The rest, not out of passion, but for livelihood, happen to play first-class cricket.Story continues below this adChase blamed the stasis on funds. There are shards of truth, too, with a wide financial gulf. In the 2024-27 cycle, India would receive 38.5% of the International Cricket Council’s revenue. West Indies’ share is a meagre 4.5%. The premise is simple — those who bring the most shall earn the most.Perhaps the idea was flawed from the start — a bunch of islands with a shared history of colonial slavery, conquering the sport of the colonisers. And that period of domination was just an accident of fate.