I heard a broadcast of the Tony Greig show in which the old ’we’ll make them grovel’’ guy raised the prospect of the West Indies team being dismantled and the likes of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica becoming, at least at the start, associate members of the International Cricket Committee (ICC).

Greig seemed to favour the move because, as he said, it would put an end to the factionalism that not only mad dogs and Englishmen say besets the regional team (I have heard Trinidadians on radio shows plump for the go-it-alone approach) but I couldn’t help but think about the old Frank Worrell and how that three-in-one West Indian must be groaning in his grave.

All of Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago could have laid claim, at one point or the other, to Frank’s loyalties and there is no doubt about that the great West Indian captain formed many friendships here, Dr Courtenay Bartholomew who remembers ’opening the innings’’ with Frank (in a low-level ’friendly’’, of course) for one, and Andy Ganteaume, one of Frank’s best friends, if not his best, for another.

For all that-and more down through the years-I don’t know that Greig’s ball will not be caught and thrown approvingly up by more and more inhabitants in this enduringly fractious island chain particularly if this WIBC-WIPA conflict drags on and the team that takes the field under the West Indian flag, in match after match, becomes even more of a collective embarrassment than it is at the moment and, indeed, has been over the last decade, give or take a stimulus pick-up or two.

Indeed, while Greig says that it will be sad to see the disintegration of the West Indies as a cricket unit it would be no worse than what we are seeing now, WICB and WIPA prattling from opposite ends of the pitch even as some frustrated island fans dream of seeing their national team play Test cricket on its own even if that means, as a start, having to fight up with the likes of the Netherlands, Bermuda and Canada and five will get you ten that T&T will get the better than any of either of these.

Test cricket, I say, but who’s to say that solo territorial teams will manifest themselves in the context of the longest form of the game and not the shortest, Twenty/20 competitions cropping up all over the place, with the prospect of one coming to flower even in that baseball place that is the United States, any blooming there sure to find fertile ground in these parts, a Trinbagonian team (assuming, that is, that we play as one and not two) sure to get a following for any game played in the Bronx, Queen’s or Brooklyn and even, such is the spread, in Atlanta or California, both.

Fanciful thoughts, you say. And I would have said so, too, except that these days who can be sure of their cricket foot from their cricket elbow, the state of the game so fluid that I guess, in the fullness of time (and sooner rather than later) even the least fancied number could play, the proposal for pink balls, the better to see under lights by players playing ’in whites’’, indicative of the Test ’imperative’’. Or, perhaps, that should be ’desperation’’, the international managers of the game spurred to think out of the 100-year-old box in their zeal to save Test cricket, a zeal, it seems to me unmatched by any zeal to save West Indian cricket.

By rights, of course, that zeal should come from us but, again five will get you ten, that the pull for a West Indian nation now could be a fifth or even a tenth of what it used to be among the pre-Independence generation and as that becomes even lower what is to come of the sentiment necessary to keep this West Indian cricket thing going, men here willing, eager even, to pick a West Indies with ten Trinidadians in the morning, the top four of Barath, Simmonds, and the Bravo brothers picking themselves, throw in Rampaul as the wicket-taking bowler, leave in Ramdin as the wicket-keeper, and a spinner or two from Powergen and Preysal and look we have more than three-quarters of a side-you finding it easy to full in the rest. Boy, look wey we reach.

Man, look wey we reach in truth.