Af­ter my last col­umn re­gard­ing the West In­dies tour of Bangladesh, my email in­box de­liv­ered a scream­er—not from a fast bowler, but from a thor­ough­ly fed-up West In­dies fan/fel­low writer. This was a fan hang­ing up his spec­ta­tor's and writer’s hat, not with a sigh, but with a mighty fling. His note, while not copied in full (and per­haps mer­ci­ful­ly so), con­firmed my sus­pi­cion: af­ter years of rid­ing the West In­dies crick­et emo­tion­al roller­coast­er, many are sim­ply get­ting off the ride.

The email start­ed by com­pli­ment­ing my tenac­i­ty in con­tin­u­ing to write about West In­dies crick­et. He said, “I have done my fair share of writ­ing and have now re­tired. I have hung up my bat, gloves, and pads and thrown away the ball and my pen. CWI re­al­ly takes us for a bunch of id­iots, and af­ter years of run­ning down West In­dies crick­et, Shal­low will ride out in­to the sun­set on No­vem­ber 27th when he will win his seat in St Vin­cent. Our own Bas­sarath will con­tin­ue the game of mu­si­cal chairs, and when he has failed, the Ja­maican, whose name has slipped me, will take over. So ba­si­cal­ly, I am leav­ing you on your own – not one res­ig­na­tion – at least fire the wa­ter boy!” The frus­tra­tion is pal­pa­ble, aimed square­ly at the top. When a fan reach­es the point of de­mand­ing the dis­missal of the wa­ter boy, you know the emo­tion­al well has run dry. I would ex­pect he is one of thou­sands of fans in the re­gion who are com­plete­ly fed up with the ad­min­is­tra­tion of West In­dies crick­et; how­ev­er, un­like many fans, he put pen to pa­per and let his feel­ings be vent­ed. But, with noth­ing hap­pen­ing, he, like so many oth­ers, just flung his hands in the air and sim­ply gave up. A com­pelling no­tion, but sad­ly, I can’t do that – I'm af­flict­ed with a stub­born loy­al­ty. I know those ad­min­is­tra­tors do not re­al­ly care about the fans and what they think, as if they did, changes would have been made a while ago.

We seem to go through the same thing over and over and ex­pect a dif­fer­ent re­sult. Of course, the hi­er­ar­chy will no doubt point to the 3-0 T20 se­ries win in Bangladesh as pos­i­tive proof that "things are chang­ing". While I am over­joyed by the vic­to­ry and ex­treme­ly hap­py for the play­ers, aren’t the West In­dies at the T20 for­mat ex­pect­ed to get a vic­to­ry over Bangladesh? I ful­ly ap­pre­ci­ate that a sin­gle se­ries vic­to­ry, even one with a clev­er­ly ap­plied coat of white­wash, does not mag­i­cal­ly erase years of ad­min­is­tra­tive sab­o­tage. As a sea­soned ob­serv­er, I know bet­ter than to con­fuse a mo­men­tary mi­rage of com­pe­tence with a gen­uine change in the desert land­scape. We've been down this op­ti­mistic path be­fore, and no­body who has suf­fered through the past two decades is will­ing to be fooled again by the fleet­ing high of a T20 win against Bangladesh. I am sim­ply prac­tis­ing his­tor­i­cal scep­ti­cism—a nec­es­sary trait when fol­low­ing West In­dies crick­et.