PLAYERS ARE the end product of a cricket organisation, be it club or country, and their performances on the field of play, whether good, indifferent or bad, is very much representative of the strength, mediocrity, or weakness of that organisation. Therefore, all judgement is cast on the players, as they are the visible ones in that arrangement.
However, there are many facets of such an establishment. There’s the administration that creates the rules under which the governance of the system shall prevail. Hence, we have in Cricket West Indies (CWI), the guidance of West Indies cricket in order for their cricketers to be serious competitors on the world stage.
To do that, the current administration must have some idea on what is required and if they themselves are lacking in such knowledge, they ensure that they surround themselves with those who have that understanding. Or put another way, to attract those with at least a modicum of cricket intelligence.
It gives me no pleasure to write that in the light of WI’s bad and inconsistent performances in the past six months, CWI must review their administration standards in order to decide if their policies are substantial towards improvement and steady development for better cricket.
Former West Indies fast bowler Daren Powell believes serious consideration should be given to attempting to retrieve the team's former coach Richard Pybus for the recently vacated position of head coach.
Pybus was sacked in controversial circumstances four years ago as part of a raft of changes made by the then-incoming Cricket West Indies administration of president Ricky Skerritt and his vice president Kishore Shallow.
"Why can't we go back for him (Pybus) he was doing a good job and we have tried another way and it seems as if things didn't go down the right road," Powell told the Mason and Guest radio program.
PACERS TION Webster, Shannon Gabriel and Uthman Muhammad did the damage on Friday, with the ball, as the Darren Bravo XI whipped the Imran Khan XI by an innings and 64 runs, on the final day of their three-day TT Red Force trial match at the Queen's Park Oval, St Clair on Friday.
Medium pacer Webster collected four wickets for 30 runs, former West Indies fast bowler Shannon Gabriel took 2/13 and fast-medium bowler Uthman Muhammad got 2/23 as the Khan XI, in their second innings, were bundled out for 110.
Veteran batsman Jason Mohammed topscored for the Khan XI with 32 and Terrence Hinds chipped in with an unbeaten 17.
On their recent tour to Australia last November/December, the West Indies bowlers suffered numerous injuries. That is not acceptable in any game of cricket, but especially in Test cricket where one’s bowlers are called upon to carry a heavy workload.
This is not light-hearted stuff whereupon a bowler may be called upon to bowl four overs only or ten overs, depending on the length of the game.
Test cricket tests the cricketer’s ability to bowl or bat for hours in addition to giving everything he can while fielding. And this could be over a period of five days, when bowling as many as 30 overs in a day is distinctly possible. The fast bowlers suffer the most from their actions because they put everything into their run-ups of more than 20 yards which would find them pounding their front feet into the turf at the bowling crease, coming down from a height after a powerful back-foot landing.
The fast bowlers who have been injured badly enough to miss a series here and a series there, have weakened WI bowling seriously enough to undermine penetration considerably. And it has been bad enough to make me wonder why, in this day and age, WI bowlers are struggling with fitness issues. Not that bowlers can’t get injured, however, it’s been happening far too often to WI bowlers as compared to others on the international cricket scene.
ormer West Indies fast bowler Sir Andy Roberts says coaching is being made a scapegoat for the team's failures.
Cricket West Indies (CWI) recently appointed Andre Coley as its interim head coach ahead of the team's tour of South Africa next month.
After unfavourable results at the ICC Men's T20 World Cup late last year, CWI did an internal investigation of the team's performance. Phil Simmons then announced he would resign from the role after a tour of Australia, which also produced poor results.
The Windies team has had frequent coaching changes in the last two decades in response to poor results, a trend similar to other sporting teams, especially football. But critics of this say that cricket is different from other sports in nature, and coaches do not have the same impact on tactics.
"That's exactly what they're doing," Roberts told the Jamaica Observer in response to whether coaches are being used as a scapegoat for bad results. "They have someone to blame, they're blaming the coaches. How come we didn't make five changes for the one-day international (ODI) team? We lost 2-0 in Australia; how come we didn't make five changes to the Test team?
