NATHAN Coulter-Nile is in line to play a Test match this summer with no Sheffield Shield matches under his belt after being picked in Australia’s squad for the series opener against the West Indies in Hobart.
It’s an extraordinary gamble on a 28-year-old who has a chequered injury history and has never played Test cricket.
Young Victorian bolter Scott Boland has been named as a standby player should frontline quicks Josh Hazlewood, Peter Siddle and James Pattinson incur any setbacks in the lead up to the match starting on December 10.
If Coulter-Nile, a player who has suffered consistent hamstring problems, is left out of the XI for Hobart, he still wouldn’t get any first-class cricket in before he is potentially needed for the second and third Tests in Melbourne and Sydney.
ST. JOHN’S, Antigua – Sunil Narine will receive the full support of the West Indies Cricket Board, following his suspension from bowling in international cricket with immediate effect.
The suspension followed the announcement from the International Cricket Council, the sport’s World governing body, that an independent assessment has found the bowling action of Narine to be illegal.
“It will be a blow to Sunil to have failed the ICC biomechanics assessment of his action and be suspended from bowling,” said WICB Director of Cricket Richard Pybus.
“We will be offering our support to Sunil as he does the remedial work on his bowling action. I know the time and effort he has put in to do this work previously and I am sure this will just deepen his resolve to come back a better bowler.”
Narine was reported after the third One-day International on the Tour of Sri Lanka earlier this month.
“Coincidences never happen. They are God’s plans that us humans know nothing about!” Thus spoke the old sage. But if coincidences do not actually occur, then surely synchronicity, that element of several related important things happening exactly at the same time, must be real! Great timing allows West Indies to be now touring Australia, for three Tests, at the same instant when Cricket Australia (CA); eventually International Cricket Council will also concur; finally plans to honour and recognise records of 1970’s era Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket (WSC). Influenced by WSC’s initial use of a ball coloured in a hue other than red – white, in that original case – pink balls are being used for the very first time in an official day-night Test, featuring Australia and New Zealand. One might come to the conclusion that massive coincidences do actually happen, but maybe God planned this too for our great game! What is amazing is that it took nearly 40 years after WSC’s life; 1977-1979; for cricket’s authorities to recognize how very useful all innovations from that period have really been. All have played regularly in coloured clothing and with white balls in shorter formats of the game, as “invented” by WSC, but until now, Tests were on hallowed ground. Nothing is new anymore! Considering that ICC, CA’s forerunner Australian Cricket Board, Kerry Packer and Marylebone Cricket Club – MCC – were at such serious, cantankerous loggerheads that they eventually ended up in court for WSC to even begin in 1977/78, Packer must be laughing very loudly up there!
West Indies head coach Phil Simmons remains confident that his young side can perform well on Australian shores this summer.
The Caribbean side take on a Cricket Australia XI in a four-day game in Brisbane starting Wednesday, before they head south to Hobart for the first of three Commonwealth Bank Tests against Australia. Simmons plans to put the West Indies through a rigorous training regime at the Bupa National Cricket Centre in Brisbane over the next few days and is hopeful his young charges will be able to quickly adapt to the conditions in Australia. "Today was the first practice and the guys looked as good as you can look after a long flight," Simmons said on Sunday.
"We still have three days practice before the warm-up game and then three more days before the Test match, so I think it is about getting ourselves sharp enough going into the warm-up game and taking the warm-up game as serious as possible and making sure that during the warm-up game we do the things we want to do during the Test match."
Six weeks after the West Indies Cricket Board suspended him as head coach for "inappropriately commenting" on the selection of the ODI squad for the tour of Sri Lanka, Phil Simmons finally laid out his case last week. In the interim, he was engaged in composing the apology demanded of him by the board for his angry words in an interview with the media, while the WICB itself had been distracted by its unrelated, complex confrontation with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) sub-committee on cricket over the conclusions of the latest review committee on its governance. In the spillover of his mounting frustration in the post he took up last March, Simmons, who is one of five national selectors, spoke of "people [who] would use their position to get people into a squad or… get people left out of a squad". In a lengthy and detailed statement presented to the WICB's chief executive officer, Michael Muirhead, Simmons left no doubt he was referring to the two most powerful men in West Indies cricket at present, board president Dave Cameron and director of cricket Richard Pybus, the Englishman who was hired in October 2013 after brief international stints in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Simmons' account, accompanied by copies of relevant emails, followed the WICB's decision to reinstate him for the current tour of Australia. The board said that it would "immediately investigate" his charges after which it would take "the necessary and appropriate action". A copy of his statement has been made available to me by a trusted source.
