The ICC T20 2026 World Cup just ended for the West Indies, and already the knives are coming out, or should I say, the cutlasses are being sharpened. The blame game that was put aside temporarily when West Indies blasted into the Super 8s, has now been resurrected in full force, as West Indies exited Super 8s and World Cup, stage left, in a whimper.

Those same tried and true boogey-men constantly paraded as the culprits regressing West Indies cricket are inevitably being brought up once more as the reasons for this West Indies cricket failure. Cue the Cricket Board members, the coaches, the selectors or the players, being brought up as the reason for not making it to the semi-finals. And all the while, the dissolution of West Indies cricket as the pinnacle of cricket craft for the West Indies region continues to spread rot into the cricket fabric that had been crafted from over 100 years of West Indies competition and perseverance.  

As a West Indian and an avid cricket fan who is literally buoyed by any Windies cricket win and depressed by its losses, I understand and commiserate with those who look to find THE ONE thing or person to blame for the West Indies team not reaching the finals portion of this ICC T20 World Cup competition. An easily quantifiable and straightforward causation is a lot more palatable than the complex qualitative factors that impact our current West Indies cricket landscape.

I need to be careful as I write this, because discounting the personal vitriolic attacks on some members of the team, its management staff and Cricket West Indies as a whole, this team actually under-achieved in this ICC World Cup. Even as I believe the over-arching reasons for the team not moving further forward in the competition are bigger than and more complex than any single thing, in-depth analysis aside, the Windies failed to execute at critical junctures in this T20 tournament.

The team certainly looked like one of the four best teams in the tournament, with some of the more important elements necessary to make it into the finals rounds, showing talent, skill, cohesion and role clarity. However, it looked like more individual players on some of the other teams had been more dedicated to their craft than some of the individual players on the West Indies team. Where some of the Windies players were forced off their team plans, a few of the other team players stayed in, and executed within, their team script. Overall, it looked like the Windies did not execute as effectively as their opposition in the critical situations in the game that could have impacted the outcome of match.

And that is the difficulty in objectively trying to assess the performance of a team sport that relies heavily on individual player performances. The non-success of some individual players does not guarantee failure of the team, and a team loss does not necessarily indicate a lack of performance by all the team members. Weave into this the added dynamic of players selected for a Windies team being citizens of individual island nations, and the possible causative factors of failure are multiplied exponentially.

An in-depth analysis of a West Indies team performance may not be as straightforward as it may initially seem.