Wavell Hinds, the West Indies Players' Association president and CEO, has been accused of not sufficiently consulting with his members. Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images

THE ANATOMY OF AN ARGUMENT

And so to India, and another fine mess. Last Friday the West Indies team pulled out of their tour of the country, abandoning the fifth game of the ODI series, a single T20 fixture, and three Tests. It was a strictly internecine conflict, a three-way tussle between the players, their union, and the board. But it has exploded, and the blast, no exaggeration, threatens the future existence of the West Indies Cricket Board.

At the heart of the matter, you will be surprised to hear, is money, and more specifically, the question of who makes how much. Oddly enough, the very same morning that the team announced they would be withdrawing from the tour, they met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. The Lama, doubtless, will be pleased that the players took a set of ceremonial scarves away from the encounter, if, apparently, very little else. Seldom can anyone have looked more miserable in the Lama’s company than Dwayne Bravo did in their pre-match photoshoot.

Bravo, West Indies’ ODI captain, has been in the thick of the fall-out. He and his team-mates may have good reason to be aggrieved. In February he and the other players met with Wavell Hinds, who is both the president and chief executive of the West Indies Players’ Association. Hinds told them then that they would have to give up a share of their international earnings. The money was needed to help fund the professional squads in the new first-class franchise system, part of a long overdue overhaul of domestic cricket in the Caribbean. Hinds asked the squad to waive a $35,000 cut of the team’s sponsorship fee they split between them on each of their overseas match days. The players agreed in principle, on the condition that they received at least some it back in another form.

In September Hinds signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Dave Cameron, the president of the WICB. Trouble being that he had, according to Bravo, barely consulted with the players about the MoU since he last spoke to them about it. The squad travelled to India without having seen the new MoU, without even having signed their new contracts.

Bravo replied, on the team’s behalf, with a scathing letter, which was leaked to the public. He said that his team were being “treated like little schoolboys”, and suggested that the old agreement was temporarily reinstated, until the tour was over, allowing time for the players, WIPA, and the WICB to renegotiate the terms of the new MoU. This plan was nixed by Cameron, who argued that since Hinds had already signed it, the new MoU stood as it was. Michael Holding, who has impeccable sources and a good measure of integrity, has said that this is a tit-for-tat ploy on Cameron’s part. The president is getting his own back, the WICB having been manipulated into signing up to that $35,000 deal by Hinds’ predecessors at the WIPA.

Hinds and Cameron are old colleagues. They are both lifelong members of Jamaica’s Kensington CC. So relations between the WICB and WIPA are better than they have been in a long time. The players think that the two bodies have become too close, and have called for Hinds to resign. In response, Hinds has said “there will be no resignation by any member of the current executive”, and dismissed the claims of the players that he had signed them up to a deal that forfeited around two-thirds of their match fees, arguing that the new agreement in fact reflected a 15 per cent across the board increase in the fees.

And the new MoU does increase the funding WIPA receives from the WICB. Hinds has said before that he thinks “a lot of [international] players have an entitlement syndrome and believe that something is owed to them”. The new MoU he has signed puts more emphasis on performance-related pay. It offers bonuses to players who makes the top 10 of the ICC rankings, and also yokes wages to the WICB’s revenues, making it, in Cameron’s words, “a true partnership”.

The WICB did not even see fit to send anyone out to India to discuss the issue with the team, even after they skipped training and a media briefing on the eve of the first ODI, which was a bone-headed play on the board’s part. The kind that makes you think, once again, that you’d have better luck finding a Mensa member in the Kardashian family than you would a competent man in cricket administration. Instead, the BCCI secretary, Sanjay Patel, persuaded the team to play on. There were whispers, since scotched by the BCCI, that if West Indies cut out of the series, they would, in turn, be cut out of the IPL. Instead, the BCCI has focused its ire on the WICB, though the West Indies board is doing its damnedest to throw the blame on to the players, and has even urged the BCCI to ban them from the IPL.

Early estimates put the BCCI’s losses at $65m. The more hot-headed members of the Indian board have suggested that they should seek to extract that same sum from the WICB. This would be an entirely fruitless pursuit. At the start of the 2012-13 financial year, the total sum of the WICB’s retained earnings was $128,090. Which is, to put it in perspective, about a quarter of the amount they spent on “balls and gear” in the next 12 months. This time last year, the WICB was $5,693,323 in debt. This year’s financial report actually began with a paragraph written by its chartered accountants at KPMG emphasising that “there is substantial doubt the company will be able to continue as a going concern”.

The BCCI is still threatening legal action and has said it will suspend all future tours to the West Indies. Either way, the WICB will be sunk. It is simply a question of how long it takes to reach the bottom. The last Indian tour to the Caribbean bought in $22.3m for the WICB, money which has sustained it for the last three years, and which is now exhausted. Which explains why the board look more concerned with appeasing India than it is in repairing relations with their own players. In fact it seems to be prepared to throw its own players under the wheels if that means it is spared itself. This, then, is the first real test of the new ICC. The BCCI will need to be beneficent, because it holds the fate of the WICB in its grasp.