“We had to do something,” said Sir Hilary Beckles , vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and former director of the West Indies cricket board. “I just hated it when in Australia a few years back there were two West Indian teams playing at the same time. One was a conglomerate of players plying their trade in the Big Bash league. The second was the West Indian national team getting hammered in the Test series.”He thereafter devised a plan with the University at the centre of it. “We had to keep it a secret. We knew there would be resistance from the officials and had to discreetly go about the plan. The public had almost given up. Most were of the view that the players who had turned free agents had every reason to do so because everyone deserved to have a good life. Our economy was in a bad shape. While we couldn’t stop (Chris) Gayle, (Sunil) Narine and the lot from doing so, we also needed to get our cricket back on track.”Beckles and his team at the UWI thereafter decided to set up a state of the art cricket academy and a proper first-class cricket facility for the students in Barbados. The 3W’s oval was redone and the first batch of students to make use of this facility was the class of 2012. And some of the members of that class include Jason Holder , Shai Hope, Shannon Gabriel, and Carlos Brathwaite . The University soon appealed the Barbados cricket officials to allow the students’ team to play the regional championship. The request was turned down. But things changed when Joel Garner took charge of Barbados cricket and agreed to allow the students to play with one condition: make it to the top four within first two years or go back to the University league.The students won the competition in the second year itself and have been winning it ever since. “Once we had Barbados won over, we appealed to the West Indies cricket board to allow the students to play the national competition as a nation. If you see our competition structure, all of the islands play against each other. We wanted the students to play like an island. By then I was part of the West Indies board and could pull a few strings. After some cajoling, the students’ team was allowed and in 2017 they won the national competition beating all the islands,” Beckles said.There were a number of finer points that Beckles and his team had to look into. While Brathwaite and Holder were talented young students with immense potential, they weren’t finished products by any means. That’s when they went to Curtly Ambrose who wasn’t doing much at the time. “Curtly told me he didn’t have a coaching degree and wouldn’t be allowed by the officials of the board to coach a team. I remember saying to him the students’ team had been allowed to compete as a special project. We immediately consulted out lawyers and they pointed out that if the team was a special project the bowling coach was also a special project. The Board brought into the argument and we got Ambrose to coach Holder and Brathwaite,” said Beckles.The final piece of the puzzle was to win the cricket fans over. “When England came to the West Indies earlier this year we asked Jason to do what no West Indian team had done recently. Beat England in a Test series. He is a fantastic leader and all of you’ve seen what happened. That’s when all of the superstars who were away playing the leagues also realised that they needed to come back and play for the West Indies. This World Cup is the first time in 15 years that we’ve our best team playing,” said a proud Beckles.Whether they win or not, they have turned things around. The way the West Indians played against New Zealand in the warmup game was indication that no team can take them lightly. “If we are able to make the last four, we will be delighted. It has taken us seven years to come to this. The fans are back to following the West Indies team. Now we are all waiting for the concluding piece and that’s the World Cup,” concluded Beckles.