Daren Ganga: West Indies' Golden T20 Cycle Is Over as the Rebuild Begins
West Indies' second T20 World Cup title, won under Daren Sammy in 2016, felt like confirmation of something permanent. The team had put adversity aside, united around a shared purpose and delivered — the latest product of a Caribbean talent supply line that had already produced the inaugural crown in 2012.
Ten years later, the same story reads very differently. Sammy is now head coach, West Indies sit seventh in the T20I rankings, and they have missed the semi-finals at all four T20 World Cups staged since that 2016 triumph.
The wider decline is just as stark. West Indies finished second from bottom in each of the first three World Test Championship cycles and sit eighth in the current one with a single series left to play. In ODIs, they missed the last two Champions Trophy editions and failed to qualify for the 2023 World Cup. The short format offers little comfort either: since the start of 2025, their 42% win rate in T20Is is better than only Sri Lanka's and Zimbabwe's among Full Member sides.
Financial strain, a thinning talent pipeline and the demands of an evolving T20 game have all complicated the transition — yet the recent series in India suggested the ability remains. The challenge is turning those flashes into something sustained.
"That cycle of players has now come to an end"
Few are better placed to weigh that challenge than Daren Ganga. The former West Indies batter and Trinidad and Tobago captain led T&T to the 2008 Stanford T20 title and to the inaugural Champions League final, a period that helped bring the likes of Kieron Pollard, Sunil Narine and Lendl Simmons into the T20 spotlight.
He sees the present moment as the close of one era and a test of how well West Indies can build the next.
"If you look at the journey of the West Indies T20I side, there was a period of growth which led to maturity with that first ICC T20 World Cup win in 2012. The core of that team went on to win in 2016. That cycle of players has now come to an end," Ganga says.
He names Sammy, Chris Gayle, Andre Russell, Dwayne Bravo, Pollard and Narine as the leaders of that success. Some have left the game; others are no longer central to the international side. The next generation now needs the pathway and the preparation to take over — and that pathway is under strain.
A coach with a 'moving pool' of players
Ganga argues that the single biggest obstacle for Cricket West Indies (CWI) is player availability — and that it shapes everything a coach can realistically do.
"One of the biggest challenges that Cricket West Indies faces is player availability, and when you have a situation like that you have to put yourself in the role of a coach," he says.
"That coach has a moving pool of players that he has to make do with, and at times you may not have five of your best bowlers who can give you a higher probability of winning a T20 match. You don't have a wide pool of resources where you have backup players who can seamlessly step into roles. When you have that sort of scenario you have to play according to the resources that you have, so you can't be so risk tolerant."
The stakes are financial as well as sporting. CWI has announced a 25% reduction in retainer fees amid mounting pressure, domestic contracts are set to be trimmed to seven months, and some tournaments have been shelved — leaving players weighing the value of staying on the CWI payroll even as the team tours India.
Nicholas Pooran, the defining batter of this generation, stepped away from international cricket last year to pursue opportunities as a T20 free agent, drawn by the bigger paydays and more predictable workload of the global franchise circuit.
The cost of running cricket across an archipelago
Ganga also points to a structural burden unique to the region: unlike India or England, where teams travel between states or counties by road, West Indies cricket spans separate countries and islands, and the cost of moving players around has climbed sharply over the last five or six years.
"That is a massive cost to bear, whether you are administering domestic tournaments or investing in training and development and moving players across the region," he says.
Travel and accommodation are especially expensive in tourism-driven economies where hotel rates run high, while CWI's revenue and its appeal to sponsors have diminished. The Caribbean Premier League (CPL) attracts much of the region's corporate interest, but the market itself is small — an increasingly unsustainable funding model for a pathway that must still produce world-class players.
West Indies head coach Daren Sammy has repeatedly framed the ongoing India tour as a meaningful gauge of his side's standing. Speaking ahead of the T20I decider — comments reported on 17 October 2026 — Sammy said his team had sent a "strong message" by pushing a five-match series against India to a decider despite financial strains and recent setbacks. He had previously, on 2 October 2026, described the ODI leg of the tour as a "good gauge" of where West Indies stand ahead of 2027 World Cup qualification.