The West Indies, aside from a brief purple patch against some of the smallest players in Test cricket, have been struggling in international cricket of late. Yes, there has been a clutch of impressive performances, none less than in the World Twenty20, but there has been a vast expanse of embarrassment in between. Their domestic set-up has also come in for quite a lot of criticism. Cricket in the West Indies, apparently, is dying.
It's not just Guyana that have that kind of abundant strength, either. A look at Barbados' resources will reveal another strong side (Brathwaite, Edwards, Smith, Carter, Stoute, Dowrich, Brathwaite, Best, Edwards, Benn, Holder), and the same is true of Jamaica (Gayle, Walton, Samuels, Bonner, Lambert, Baugh, Russell, Bernard, Miller, Taylor, Cottrell) and Trinidad and Tobago (Barath, Simmons, Bravo, Ramdin, Bravo, Pollard, Emrit,, Rampaul, Narine, Kantasingh, Gabriel) in equal measure. Those are just rough elevens, of course, selected in about thirty seconds from a sofa in England, but they are all of a similar quality to the top-end Associates and bottom-end Full Members.
Of course, partitioning these nations would not be the bed of roses I've described either. There would be a whole swathe of nations without the strength of the Caribbean "Big Four", and whose players would lose the opportunity to play Test cricket that they currently enjoy. Darren Sammy, for instance, would go from being the West Indies skipper in Test cricket to St. Lucia skipper in something like WCL2. But for the good of the game, and its growth, I believe it would be for the best.
And it would fit in nicely with my pipedream of a competitive sixteen team world cup - the other nine Full Members, Ireland, Afghanistan, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and T&T would all have a chance of beating each one-other on the right day.