While India’s displeasure threatens West Indian prospects, the West Indies Cricket Board has more pressing matters to resolve. Its team is scheduled to tour South Africa in December and January, then take part in the World Cup, which will be played in Australia and New Zealand in February and March.

The West Indies Cricket Board has assured South Africa that the tour will happen, but will struggle to send a credible team unless the dispute can be resolved. A World Cup without West Indies might seem unthinkable; then again, so did a team baling on a tour of India.

The problem is that this is no simple dispute between the West Indian players and the authorities. Rather, it’s a three-way disagreement. The players’ anger is directed as much at their representatives in the players association as at the board. Bravo has claimed that Hinds “hoodwinked” the international players over the new contract, hailed only last month as promising stability after the years of disputes.

The three parties met in Kingston, Jamaica, last weekend. A joint statement said that “the meeting was cordial, positive and fruitful, and discussions will continue in an effort to find a way forward following the premature end to the tour of India.”

It all adds up “to a lose-lose situation,” said Tony Cozier, a veteran West Indian broadcaster. The losers include the wider game of cricket, which certainly cannot afford to lose one of the most storied and passionate of its 10 test-playing nations. Yet cricket’s ruling body, the International Cricket Council, has so far kept its distance, arguing that tours are bilateral matters between the countries involved. Its executive committee will discuss the issue at its Nov. 10 meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

“I don’t believe they will be lost, I can’t imagine that,” Wally Edwards, the Australian chairman of the International Cricket Council’s executive committee, told ESPN Cricinfo. “They’ve had disputes before, they’ve had ongoing rumblings there for quite a while, and I feel confident they will get resolved and West Indies will stay a very important part of world cricket.”

Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, has written to Dave Cameron, president of the West Indies Cricket Board, suggesting mediation by a three-person panel of current and former prime ministers representing Caricom, an organization of 15 Caribbean nations and dependencies. He also proposed that the panel look beyond the current crisis to the longer-term problems of West Indian cricket.