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Ewing was drafted 11 years before their unbeaten streak ended. While he would be known in Jamaica it’s very unlikely his career would have had any impact on the lower interest in cricket over the last quarter century.
Basketball undoubtedly has a presence in the islands but no more than soccer or boxing or sprinting, all of which have produced more than their fair share of decent athletes.
Terrible management and planning and development is running a Winx-like race compared to the other competing factors in the decline
Patrick Ewing was already in the US in 1975.
The biggest threat to WI cricket in recent years has been as you said WI cricket.
We're lucky that we are in the position that our top players can choose to (and want to) focus on test cricket and skip the IPL. Rare for a WI player to do that. I get it, it's a far less wealthy part of the world and the board historically hasn't looked after the players who are now in the position to make a million bucks for two months work. I can barely keep up with who their test/ODI/T20I captains are month to month.
Chris Gayle (2000) was their most recent debut to make it to 100 tests. Most of their better players are short form specialists. They've won the T20 WC twice and their players regularly feature prominently in T20 comps around the world.
For a while it seemed like a higher proportion of Indian rather than African background players were making it to international level (typically from Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana). Did wonder if that was a trend or not, both due to African background athletes being attracted to more athletic sports and the Indian diaspora taking cricket to all corners. I hope they get it together, they still produce talented players with varying skill sets.