Greenidge: Selectors Go On Instincts

West Indies senior selector Gordon Greenidge has formally confirmed what we already knew: the criteria for selection to the West Indies team has little to do with performances at the regional first class level.

Greenidge, who serves on the Viv Richards-led selection panel made it clear in an interview with the Barbados Nation that there is more to finding place in the senior team than runs and wickets in regional tournaments. "Sometimes we go on gut feeling. Sometimes we go on what that person possesses, body language, understanding, that know-how. It doesn't always come over to the public the same way."

The former champion opener, who sits on the selection panel alongside chairman Sir Viv Richards and Joey Carew, said it was not always possible to choose just on performance "because the way those performances are acquired doesn't necessarily lend or promote that individual for international cricket."

The selection panel has come up with some major surprises in the last year, picking relative unknowns like Omari Banks, Fidel Edwards, Dwayne Smith and Dwight Washington from obscurity and fast-tracking them to the senior team.

As expected, those picks mean that consistent performers at the regional level -- most noticeably Pedro Collins in this year's Carib Beer Cup -- have been overlooked. But, Greenidge defended the panel's choices. "We here in Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, regardless of whatever we wish to say, still like to see our own selected, regardless of whether he deserves a play or not...But I am a West Indian. I've been given a task to select a team with my other two colleagues and I can tell you I am not going just on performance."

"We have to see beyond that. Too often in the past we have recycled. Occasionally that will still happen because of the lack of players we have available and the lack of international understanding in those players," he added.

"It is never an easy job. We see things perhaps that others don't see, but we have the choice to make. They don't. It may not look pleasing to others, but we have that choice to make. They don't. I am certain that had those persons been in our shoes, I am wondering what they would have done, what other choices they would have made."