A captain for the next 10 years is what the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) should be looking for, former Test pacer Andy Roberts has suggested.

Roberts, a member of the fearsome quartet of fast bowlers in the 1970s and 1980s, said a short tem leader to carry the team into Cricket World Cup 2007 is not what the authorities should be contemplating.

Roberts said since 1996, the WICB has wrongly focused its attention on an immediate fix to the problem plaguing the team and game regionally.

"Anything we are doing now we have to think for the future," he said while appearing on OBSERVER Radio's Sunday's Big Issues discussion program that dealt with the present state of Windies cricket.

"Everything we are doing we are doing for today. I wouldn't be surprised if we named a captain just to try and win the World Cup. I would name a captain for the next five to 10 years," Roberts added.

He recalled that the Windies won the first World Cup in 1975 in England with a relatively inexperienced Clive Lloyd at the helm.

"People forget that when we won the World up in 1975 we had a rookie captain, because Clive Lloyd had been captain for just one year."

Roberts was a member of the team that won the trophy then and retained it in 1979.

The WICB is set to name a replacement for Shivnarine Chanderpaul who resigned two weeks ago after the tour of New Zealand where the Windies were beaten 2-0 in the Test series and 4-1 in one-day internationals.

The former coach said he has heard reports of players undermining Chanderpaul's captaincy in New Zealand and on last November's tour of Australia because he did not support a players' strike before last summer's tour of Sri Lanka, which took place without some senior players, including world-record holder, Brian Lara.

He said if the reports are true, the players showed a lack of professionalism because the team does belong to Chanderpaul.

"One of the things that is disturbing to our cricket is here we have a bunch of fellows who call themselves professional cricketers but in truth and in fact they are not professionals at all," Roberts said.

"Even if I have a problem with Chanderpaul...because he decided to ignore the rest of the players and went onto Sri Lanka that shouldn't stop me as an individual performing to the best of my ability to make sure that West Indies win, not make sure Chanderpaul wins.

"But it is not happening because we are not true professionals. That's part of the problem. I heard stories that some of these players say that they are not supporting Chanderpaul in Australia. It never occurred to them that it is not Chanderpaul they were supporting it is West Indies (cricket) they are supporting.

"He (Chanderpaul) had his problems. I think he was forced out. If anybody could tell me that Chanderpaul just walked away from the captaincy just like that would be joking. He was forced out of it, bearing in mind he didn't do a good job as a captain.

"But he was the captain and once you are on the cricket field you must give support to the captain," Roberts said.