Former West Indies fast bowler Sir Andy Roberts says coaching is being made a scapegoat for the team’s failures.

Cricket West Indies (CWI) recently appointed Andre Coley as its interim head coach ahead of the team’s tour of South Africa next month.

After unfavourable results at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup late last year, CWI did an internal investigation of the team’s performance. Phil Simmons then announced he would resign from the role after a tour of Australia, which also produced poor results.

The Windies team has had frequent coaching changes in the last two decades in response to poor results, a trend similar to other sporting teams, especially football. But critics of this say that cricket is different from other sports in nature, and coaches do not have the same impact on tactics.

“That’s exactly what they’re doing,” Roberts told the Jamaica Observer in response to whether coaches are being used as a scapegoat for bad results. “They have someone to blame, they’re blaming the coaches. How come we didn’t make five changes for the one-day international (ODI) team? We lost 2-0 in Australia; how come we didn’t make five changes to the Test team?

“My emphasis doesn’t depend on coaching. It depends on the players shouldering the responsibility to develop their game to the point that all the coach has to do is to make sure they go through their drills.”

For Roberts, the real issue is player development. He says too many players in the selection pool lack an understanding of the fundamentals of cricket. He says, although a coach of the senior team may be important for executing daily training drills, coaches are needed to teach the fundamentals at the grass-roots level, but enough attention is not being placed there.

“We have to get this right and try to develop our players from Under-15s up to the senior level,” he said. “They are the ones who have to get it right. That is where you need your best coaches, not at the Test match level. At that level, you need somebody who can plan the game, who has an eye for the game and I don’t think that we have too many students of the game playing today.”

The view that coaching is overemphasized is supported by the illustration of the captain of a cricket team. Unlike in other sports where a captain’s main role is to motivate players and lead by example through experience, or even speak on behalf of the team when needed, in cricket, the captain is responsible for on-field decisions such as batting and bowling strategies, setting fielders, choosing the batting line up and bowling spells.

If enough good cricketers are not being produced across the region, does this then mean the captain’s competence and decision-making should be questioned? Roberts says that given the state of affairs in West Indies cricket, questioning the captain at the moment is pointless.

“I’m not going to blame the captain, you know,” he said. “You could make as correct a decision as you possibly can as the captain, but if you don’t have the players to carry out the instruction, how are you going to succeed? So, the emphasis should start on developing the players. Not coaches.”

Roberts says the problems started with the appointment of the first foreign coach, Australian Bennett King, in 2005.

“I think we’re wasting a whole lot of dollars on employing coaches and our cricket still hasn’t moved an inch upwards. If it moved anywhere, it’s downwards.”

Roberts represented the West Indies in Tests and ODIs from 1974 to 1983. He was a member of a generation of West Indies players that not only won two consecutive World Cups in 1975 and 1979 but also went unbeaten in 27 Tests in a 15-year period starting in 1980. Unlike in the modern era, these teams had no coach. Instead, the captain made the important decisions, but all players held each other accountable as well.

“All of us were coaches,” Roberts said. “I can remember many times Deryck Murray, the wicketkeeper, would come to me and tell me, ‘listen, you’re falling away too much’.

“That’s what you needed from somebody who knows you, can analyse your game, and come and tell you. You don’t want them telling you two days later. You want them telling you in the heat of the moment so that you have time in which to try to correct it.”

Coley’s first match with the West Indies is on February 28, in their first of two Tests against South Africa. The teams then meet in three ODIs, and three Twenty20 International matches.