Is this the end of Windies Cricket's long winter?

"Winter is coming," is a regular refrain in the critically acclaimed and very popular television series Game of Thrones. Winter is not just winter as we know it. It is a time of darkness, of death, and destruction all round.

Every winter also brings the possibility of another "long night," a particularly harsh winter thousands of years prior that lasted over a generation, "when children were born and lived and died, all in darkness...when Kings froze to death in their castles, same as the shepherds in their huts." Winter in Westeros (the fictional continent in Game of Thrones) comes fraught with dread and despair, and with no certainty of survival.

Windies cricket has been going through a protracted miserable period -- a long winter, if you will, where they move from crisis to crisis and from loss to embarrassing loss. A period in which a number of players joined the team and had reasonably long careers without experiencing any reasonable run of success. A period marked by acrimony between the senior players and the authorities, that manifested itself in public spats, court cases and even an abandoned tour. And the innings and 209-run defeat in the