Here's one for cricket fans. Try picking your all-time West Indies team. It will not be an easy task because the depth of talent to have come from the cricketing islands of the Caribbean is nothing short of staggering. From George Headley to Viv Richards, Sir Learie Constantine to Sir Garfield Sobers, Sonny Ramadhin to Lance Gibbs, Wes Hall to Malcolm Marshall there are literally dozens of greats who could be justifiably included. But there is only one name from the present-day players, Brian Charles Lara, who might be considered good enough to take his place.
Lara's brilliance as a batsman is unquestionable. In an ever more mediocre team, he has been the one modern West Indian with pretensions to greatness. But he has let himself, and his team, down badly by his failure to use his position as captain to find a solution to the unseemly sponsorship row that threatens to make the forthcoming series between West Indies and South Africa little more than a sporting shambles.
When the first Test begins this week at the Kensington Oval in Barbados, Lara will be one of seven players sitting it out on the sidelines as a woefully under-strength team, now captained by Shivnarine Chanderpaul, takes the field. And most pundits would agree the Windies are likely to be on the receiving end of a hammering that might once have been taken as a humiliation but is now seen as only the latest episode of a gruesome soap opera in which West Indies have been reduced from their position of Kings of Cricket to being little more than an international joke.
At the root of the problem lies the fact that Lara, along with former team-mates Chris Gayle, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Fidel Edwards, Dwayne Bravo, Dwayne Smith and Ravi Rampaul, have personal sponsorship deals with the telecommunications company Cable and Wireless, who, until July last year, were the sponsors of the West Indies team. But an impasse has now developed between the players and the West Indian Cricket Board because the board has signed a multi-million dollar contract for team sponsorship with the Irish company Digicel. Not surprisingly, Digicel are unhappy about the concept of star players giving publicity to their rival's products and have dug in their heels. They have openly questioned whether they are getting value for their $20m four-year investment, and relations between the company and the players were hardly helped by a leaked memo from a Digicel sponsorship manager who said West Indies seemed more interested in getting a collective leg-over than playing cricket during last year's VB trophy in Australia, when West Indies won only one of their six matches.
His observation was that certain players had more women's phone numbers than runs. The concept of philandering cricketers on tour is hardly a new one. But Lara's critics - and there are plenty - were given even more ammunition to add to their argument that he is not fit to be captain. The probability is that Lara's team was no more interested in accumulating notches on bedposts than any Test team of previous years but the problem for Lara compared with his illustrious predecessors was that he was not captaining a team of winners.
Rarely has one player split public opinion in the Caribbean to the same extent as Lara. To most in Trinidad, his home island, he remains a sporting icon. For them his brilliance is to be cherished and his failings brushed aside. But elsewhere opinion has long since hardened against a man who has fallen out with his fellow players and officials with uncomfortable ease over the years and now stands accused of putting his own financial interests before the well-being of West Indies cricket.
Sir Viv Richards has been openly critical, as have other high-profile former Test players, and it is easy to see why. The West Indies Cricket Board offered Lara a route back to the team last week when it recognised that his deal with Cable and Wireless was a "pre-existing contract", but Lara rejected its overtures. Lara's supporters argue that the WICB is unaccountable and incompetent, and they may well have a point. But surely a man who might lay claim to being the world's greatest batsman would be better placed to negotiate a settlement from within the team instead of effectively electing to throw his toys out of the pram and take his ball home.
A friend of mine in the Caribbean said yesterday: "Please be careful what you say, because the sport is bleeding to death. People are hurting and the sport is struggling as never before. Cricket remains central to Caribbean life, but the West Indies team is falling apart."
In such circumstances a strong player and a charismatic captain could provide the leadership to show that playing for West Indies remains the pinnacle of sporting ambition. Those cricketing knights Frank Worrell and Sobers, or giants of the game like Richards and Sir Clive Lloyd might have found a way to unite the team. Sadly, Lara seems to have chosen another direction and island cricket could suffer lasting damage.
In two years' time, cricket's World Cup heads for the Caribbean and I shudder to think what problems might lie ahead. Perhaps, by then, West Indies cricket will have turned a corner, although that is hard to visualise in the current climate. Lara owes it to the sport that has made him a rich man to strive for more than his bank balance. Whatever the outcome, Lara certainly misses out on the captaincy slot in my all-time XI. In fact, I think I might just ask him to sit it out altogether.