I'm a bit late to this but I believe that his injuries were badly mismanaged when he was a teenager for which he was blamed, then left out of the Windies under 19 World Cup squad as a result. It took him a year or two playing club cricket over here with my local team Horsham to get noticed by Sussex, so coming over for money reasons doesn't ring true. They have changed the qualification rules deliberately though, which I believe they'd only changed to 7 years in recent times due to the influx of Kolpak cricketers.