West Indies have enormous worries

It's easier to remove Lord Nelson's statue from Heroes Square than to captain the West Indies team at the moment.

Skipper Carl Hooper should have known this better than anybody else because he said, while he was in exile, that personnel changes would not solve all the problems in West Indies cricket for they are too many and too diversed.

I don't see how he could think that things would have changed in his short stint at the helm. That would have taken a Jesus-like miracle since the administrative structure is the same and there is still the nucleus of the team that he inherited.

Yet some of Hooper's recent behaviour suggests that he anticipated there would have been an immediate overhaul in their attitude and application to playing and that the results would be different.

How else could you put into context his rash statement that even if Steve Waugh was captain the team still would not win? This is clearly the reaction of a man who is beginning to feel the pressure of leading a team that is continuing to perform way below par most of the time.

However, it is obvious that a chronic case of foot-in-mouth disease will do more to hurt his cause than help it because when you speak with a loose tongue you merely serve to undermine the confidence of your team and then it will be hard to ask them to lift their performance once they get in the middle.

After all, they have feelings and while I won't want to suggest that they will under-perform deliberately to embarrass the skipper, it is quite possible that they will be less inclined to give 100 per cent for a man who seeks to put them down in public than if he was more sympathetic to their failings.

Hooper might be frustrated but he must take into account that with the squad already getting a tongue lashing from millions of disappointed and angry supporters they need all the internal support they can get to stay grounded else the boat would sink even in shallow waters.

Perhaps only Brian Lara and himself will qualify for this exclusive league of being world-class, therefore reticence and discretionary language must be the order of the day in evaluating the merits of the side especially, I emphasise, when it comes to making public pronouncements.

Obviously the players will still be annoyed but I think they will take it a lot better if Hooper reserves some of his untimely comments for the dressing room and not at the table of a Press conference.

Usually, they can't wait to pounce on the wounded, why give them more ammunition than they need to finish the job? The West Indies cricketers can ill afford such a situation where they are already coming out second best by a long, long way.

This will be a long tedious period of transition and it will require plenty of patience from all the stakeholders in West Indies cricket. We must present a united front to the world as we bid to reclaim the glory days.

In the short-term and even the long-term people like Hooper will need to be giving both the players and the genuine supporters a greater measure of reassurance that all is not lost and that with time, with the right methods and right attitudes in place we can resurface as a major force in the world game.

Hooper needs to ponder on these things before he puts his foot in his mouth again. He does not need to make his job any harder than it already is.