When I was a boy, there was nothing to me like West Indies cricket. The names of players like Worrell, Weekes, and Walcott, Ramadhin, and Valentine were like music to my ears.
When I became a young man, West Indies cricket was still dear to me, so much so that even when Maurice Foster, my schoolmate, was not selected to the team, even at Sabina Park, and when Jamaicans called for us to go it alone, I still remained committed to West Indies cricket.
Names like Sobers and Kanhai, Hall, Griffith, and Gibbs were like distant drums calling me to the game.
In the days of Rowe and Richards, Lloyd, Richardson, Lara, Roberts, Holding, and Dujon, etcetera, I was still a West Indian man, win, lose, or draw.
I never imagined, or rather, I could never have imagined, cricket, or Test cricket, without my beloved West Indies, a West Indies, which was, a time or two, the champions of the world, and at one time, the team rated as the greatest of all time.
St John’s, ANTIGUA - Defending ICC WT20 Champions, WINDIES Women continue with their preparations for the upcoming event later this year.
CWI is rolling out its high-performance program and this includes a 14-member women’s squad that will gather in Antigua for a month, from April 30- May 30 to participate in a camp.
CWI’s Director of Cricket Jimmy Adams indicated this will be the first step in growing and strengthening the WINDIES Women’s team, “CWI is cognizant of the difficulties and challenges faced by the Women cricketers in getting the best training facilities and world class support in their individual territories. Therefore, this is a move by CWI to address that issue and to get them the relevant support staff to best prepare them for international cricket.”
New find, 17-yr old Guyanese Shabika Gajnabi, will join this unit for the first time. Gajnabi is a talented right-handed batter who has captained her national Women’s U-19 team for the last two years. Felicia Walters who made her WINDIES Women’s debut at the World Cup last year, returns to the squad joining the rest of the unit in Antigua.
WINDIES Women’s Head Coach, Henderson Springer will be assisted by Stuart Williams, who previously worked as Assistant Coach of the WINDIES Women during the 50-overs World Cup in 2017. The support team will also include a physiotherapist and strength and conditioning coach.
Kyshona Knight and Afy Fletcher will miss the camp because of injury. Deandra Dottin is unavailable due to personal reasons.
The Barbados Tridents have announced Jason Holder as their captain for the 2018 Hero Caribbean Premier League. Holder missed last season’s tournament as he was playing cricket for the Windies in England. He returns for the 2018 season to lead his home team.
Holder has led the Windies in 77 international matches and brings a huge amount of captaincy experience to the Tridents squad. He willl be looking to lead his team to the knockout stages of this year’s tournament after the Tridents missed out on the final stages in 2017.
As a local player and the captain of the Windies Test and ODI teams, Holder will be an exciting appointment for the loyal Tridents fans. A world-class seam bowler and an explosive lower order batsman, Holder’s ability as both a player and a leader will be a massive boost to his team’s chances in 2018.
Speaking about his appointment as captain for the Tridents, Holder said: “I am delighted to be back at the Hero CPL for this season and I am really looking forward to making Barbados proud in 2018. We have a healthy contigent of local players in the squad this year and we are ready to make this a winning year for our home team.”
Another of the nine Bajan players who be part of the team’s squad for Hero CPL 2018, Shamar Springer, is delighted with the appointment of his countryman as captain. Springer said: “Jason is a world-class player and a world-class captain that I have always looked up to as an example to follow. I am really excited to play under him as captain and I am confident he will get the best out of the Trident team this year when the CPL gets underway"
St John’s, ANTIGUA With less than 400 days to go before the Cricket World Cup 2019 and with four away international series, another round of its premier regional competitions, Cricket West Indies (CWI) will assemble 10 of the best young and upcoming fast bowlers in the region. They will participate in a fast bowling camp from April 30- June 30 in Antigua.
The camp will focus on a high-performance program which will hasten the bowlers’ development, aimed at getting them ready for international cricket, while preparing them to be available for selection onto the WINDIES Senior and A Teams.
The Selection Panel of CWI believes these players are the “core of the bunch” of young fast bowlers in the West Indies.
CWI’s Director of Cricket, Jimmy Adams is excited for this camp, indicating it could be the first of many, as, “the long-term goal is that this program could be annual, including but not limited to this group. After an assessment of this camp, the team will determine when the next one will be. We will keep identifying our core group of emerging talent and the broader view is that we can eventually run the program not just for fast-bowlers but in the key areas of cricket.”
The high-performance team of Richard Pybus and Graeme West will also include Roddy Estwick, Curtly Ambrose and support staff.
The bowlers selected for this camp include: Dominic Drakes Chemar Holder Keon Joseph Shermon Lewis Jeremiah Louis Keemo Paul Raymon Reifer Romario Shepherd Odean Smith Oshane Thomas
The camp will be based at the Coolidge Cricket Ground, Antigua - home of West Indies Cricket.
Captain of the West Indies Jason Holder says 2017 was a reasonably good year for his team but the regional side has to be more consistent.
The West Indies won three of the ten Test matches they played last year, lost six and one was drawn. They defeated Pakistan by 106 runs at Kensington Oval, staged a remarkable five-wicket victory against England at Headingley and won by 117 against Zimbabwe in Bulawayo to clinch the two-match series 1-0.
West Indies captain Jason Holder
“We are at a stage in our careers where we are looking to make a progression forward. Last year was a reasonably good year for us, we won a couple of Test matches and a Test series. The beauty of winning that series in Zimbabwe is that most of the guys got the feeling of what it was like to be victorious in a Test series for the first time. We got to try to be more consistent, the lack of consistency has hampered us in the past, it is an area that we have to address,” Holder told Barbados TODAY.
The West Indies’ next Test series is against Sri Lanka in the Caribbean from May 30 to June 27 and Holder said the players had been using the time to prepare for the series which includes the first day/night Test match in the region to be played at Kensington Oval from June 23 to 27.
