In Search of Five Day Matches

First class cricket in the West Indies will take a step forward this year with the adoption of a five-day format for the Carib Beer finals, a move designed to prevent a dull draw and a contrived result.

This refreshing sign of life from the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) opens the door to an improvement in the standard of regional first class cricket.

Five day matches largely prevent the use of some of the negative strategies that we have seen employed in many of the first-class games in recent years. With regional bowling attacks that cannot match the firepower of the batting lineups, games are often played purely for the first innings advantage which is then carefully guarded.

This approach affects even team selection, as bits-and-pieces containment bowlers are often preferred to genuine attacking bowlers, and the reliance is placed on the batsmen to win the match in the first innings while the team suffocates the opposition in the second.

Sadly, this philosophy seems to have penetrated even into the senior side, especially under captains such as Carl Hooper and Jimmy Adams. It becomes a sort of catch-22 when the bowlers that do well in the domestics and get selected for Tests are better suited to negative cricket and even an aggressive captain is left with few options.

Test cricket is best played as an attacking game. While a draw is certainly an honourable fallback position, it should only be contemplated when any reasonable chance of victory has been lost. Our best players, our most successful players, our most loved players, have always been attacking players, from Garfield Sobers to Viv Richards to Courtney Walsh to Brian Lara. The West Indies did not dominate world cricket for two decades with a negative approach, and it will not dominate it again with one.

The best moments in recent West Indian history came when we were on the attack. When Jermaine Lawson decimated the mighty Australians in Antigua, it was not by bowling every delivery in the blockhole with men covering the boundary. When Brian Lara drove back the previous Aussie invasion in his famous stand at Kensington Oval, it was by taking on the bowlers and putting them to the sword. Calypso cricket, and it could be argued, all successful modern cricket, is about attacking the opposition, not wearing him down.

Five day finals are a good first step towards building a successful Test side, but the idea needs to be expanded in the near future to include the entire competition. The move would change the entire mindset of regional cricket back to one that is based on attack rather than defence, and will encourage the return of the genuine attacking bowler. With attacking bowlers we can have attacking captains and be once again on our way towards being a significant force in Test cricket.

There currently exists too great a gap between first-class cricket and Test cricket in the Caribbean, and adopting five day matches is one way to prepare players for the game at the highest level. Certainly modern cricket requires that players round out their skills more, but domestic cricket in the West Indies has far too many average players -- bits and pieces men who can bat a little, bowl a little, but do neither exceptionally well.

It is questionable whether a young Courtney Walsh or Colin Croft would make the Jamaican or Guyanese teams today, in preference to a Gareth Breese or a Neil McGarrell. Longer first class matches will put the emphasis back on the qualities needed for Test cricket, and open more doors for the kinds of players that the West Indies desperately needs to regain success at the highest level.