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Guyana, Jun 21: West Indies' cricketers limped onto their tour bus taking them away from chilly northern England on Wednesday, beaten 3-0 in a Test series and with their preparations for the one-day series in disarray.

Cold, out of form, and widely criticised, the players are far from enjoying their tour of England and no solutions appear to be in sight.

Three players selected for West Indies' limited-overs squad will not arrive in England until Thursday. They will miss that day's warm-up match for the three one-day internationals and two Twenty20 matches against England.

West Indies is facing a bowling crisis and that may require some Caribbean county cricketers to be called on for the warm-up match against England 'A' at Worcester.

Dwayne Bravo, Fidel Edwards and Darren Sammy are all carrying injuries from the team's seven-wicket defeat against England in the fourth and final Test at Chester-Le-Street, a result that extends West Indies' winless streak to 20 straight Tests.

Austin Richards, Lendl Simmons and Dwayne Smith will not arrive in time for the England 'A' match, but will be available for two lesser warm-up games, against Derbyshire and the PCA Masters XI at Arundel.

Antiguan batting great Viv Richards says West Indies cricket is in crisis.

"It is getting near to breaking point" he said. "The West Indies must think seriously - what is most important? Is it the people with their personal political agendas, or the majority of the people who are the supporters of West Indies cricket?"

Acting captain Daren Ganga, flying home because he has not been selected for the one-day squad, tried to put a brave face on the team's plight, saying West Indies had made mistakes at critical moments.

But Ganga's captaincy was poor. At Chester-Le-Street, in reply to West Indies' first-innings score of 287, England was in trouble at 165-6 after lunch on day four against a bowling attack that has plenty of passion but lacks application.

Paul Collingwood and Matt Prior then enjoyed 15 overs batting against West Indies' second-string bowlers to take the game away from the tourists. Asked why he had not been bowled during that period, pace bowler Fidel Edwards shrugged his shoulders and said, "it wasn't in the plan."

Edwards, who took 5-112 in that innings, was fined 15 percent of his match fee on Wednesday for swearing loudly during the match.

Collingwood and Prior put on 169, England scored 400 and went on to win within three and a half days for a 3-0 series victory.

"We are a couple of sessions away from winning Test matches. That is something we need to address," said Ganga ahead of a tough Test series at South Africa at the end of the year. 

Asked about the apparently casual attitude of West Indies' players, Ganga said: "West Indian culture is very unique. We need to appreciate that and to find ways, slowly and gradually, of changing that relaxed sort of mode into a more professional mode, and I think we are well on the way.

"The effort is always there by all the players. It's a subtle change and cannot happen overnight. There is a lot of talent, a lot of potential in our team."

The chaos on the field has been matched by backbiting and arguments off it. Allrounder Marlon Samuels wrote a letter protesting at his non-selection in the original squad, and opener Chris Gayle complained about a curfew intended to curb the players' tendency to socialise too much during games.

When Samuels was called up to replace injured captain Ramnaresh Sarwan, it was discovered he did not have a visa for England and so missed a warm-up match for the third Test.

In the television studios and press boxes, where retired cricketers congregate, old West Indies greats have watched the team's loss of form with a mixture of sorrow and anger.

Colin Croft, one of the great fast bowlers, told the BBC that "if West Indies cricket is to have any future impact in world cricket, then a clean slate of learning, fertile ground for progress, opportunities and technologies must be provided and the governance must change.

"Keeping the old status quo would do nothing but patch over the cracks, prolong the long-toothed, ill-defined and ill-executed ideas, and provide no immediate or even future planned hope of becoming better."