Why did the West Indies cricket go down

The West Indies cricket team is the owner of many myths. One of the most prevalent ones is the status of the all-conquering teams of the 1970s and 1980s - it has reached the point where all perspective is lost. They were unstoppable and had no weaknesses. The recently-concluded series in the Caribbean between West Indies and India had more TV coverage of Sir Vivian Richards, Joel Garner and Michael Holding than it had of any of the players taking part in it.

But it isn't just in the past where the West Indies has cricketing myths. There is another one that is talked about so often that people assume it is true, and it is a lot more pernicious than ones about brilliant teams of the past - that cricket in the region is dying.

There are innumerable examples of the sport being in rude health in the region, and none more emphatic than the Test team's displays. This year, West Indies won three global tournaments - the men's World T20, the women's World T20 and the under-19 World Cup. To suggest that Caribbean cricket is in some sort of perilous state in the face of that level of success is a touch ridiculous.

That is not to say that there are no issues facing the sport. Governance of cricket in the West Indies has been making headlines for years now, not least when Dwayne Bravo led a player revolt in India in October 2014 that saw the tour abandoned. The ripples from the shockwaves that event caused are still being felt, with the breakdown in relationships that it caused having never been fully repaired.

That hugely public spat has seen the fractures that existed between the best cricketers in the West Indies, their board and the players union go from difficult to unworkable. It has seen Chris Gayle, Dwayne Bravo, Andre Russell, Jerome Taylor and Darren Sammy became freelance players that pick and choose when they play for their international team. That choice is very rarely one that includes Test cricket. It has been two years since Gayle played a Test, while Dwayne Bravo, after waiting for more than four years for a Test recall, pulled down the curtains on his career in the longest format.