All 15 members of the Cricket West Indies (CWI) Emerging Players Academy are now accredited cricket coaches after successfully completing both the Foundation Coaching and CWI Competition Coaching (Level 1) accreditation courses.
Guyanese Kevlon Anderson and Ashmead Nedd are part of the Academy.
CWI Coach Development Manager, Chris Brabazon and CWI’s High-Performance Manager, Graeme West recently guided the players through the assessments which formed a crucial component of the initial academy camp that is currently taking place in Antigua.
The key aim of incorporating these development opportunities into the camp schedule was to provide players with a greater understanding and appreciation of the role of a coach whilst also providing the players with the practical skills required to deliver quality coaching sessions.
As part of their involvement in the CWI Emerging Player Academy, the players will soon be assisting in the delivery of grass roots cricket programmes in their respective communities. These community projects will provide them with opportunities to utlilise their newfound coaching skills whilst inspiring the next generation of young cricketers to follow in their footsteps.
The West Indies will face India on Friday in the first of three ODIs in Trinidad and Tobago but they will be without one player that Captain Nicolas Pooran would dearly like to see taking the field sometime soon.
Shimron Hetmyer, who has not played for the West Indies since November 2021, has been training with the squad but according to the Windies' white-ball captain, the Guyanese middle-order batsman, still has a lot of work to do on his fitness before he can suit up once again.
“He is here doing a lot of work on his fitness and that is really nice to see, the effort that he has been putting in,” Pooran said during a media session on Thursday.
The long-awaited Roland Butcher Cricket Training Bats were launched at the famous Lord’s Cricket Ground in London recently. The bats have been specially designed to tackle a technical problem that plagued the ex-English cricketer throughout his 20-year professional career and is anticipated to help hundreds of cricketers in the future.
“Throughout my career I had a technical problem with the balls that came into the right-handed batsman, and I had great difficulty in correcting this problem throughout my career,” explained Butcher. “Once I had retired this continued to weigh heavily on my mind and I started investigating different ways to solve the problem. This problem was solved by designing a bat that corrected this technical flaw. I firmly believe that my new training bat will help all current and future cricketers develop the batting skills and techniques required to be successful in their elite careers.”
Butcher, a Barbadian, was the first black cricketer to be selected to play for England and had an illustrious career, which included playing for Middlesex County Cricket Club. Butcher also played regional cricket for Barbados and served as an administrator for the Barbados Cricket Association for many years. Butcher was also head coach of the Sports Academy at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, as well as the director of sports. Butcher, a former footballer of note, was the pivotal figure in leading that institution into First Division Cricket in Barbados.
West Indies coach Phil Simmons expects a much better showing from the team’s batsmen ahead of the upcoming series against India.
The Windies line-up struggled mightily against Bangladesh, albeit in difficult circumstances for batting in the most recent One Day International series. In three matches the team, batting first on each occasion, managed just a total of 435.
The team’s captain Nicholas Pooran was the team’s scorer with 91 runs but scored 73 in the final game when the series was already decided. Shamarh Brooks was the next best and he totalled 42 over the three matches. Despite facing superior opposition, India, in another series beginning on Friday, Simmons does not expect such a brutal showing with the bat.
“You expect a better batting performance. You don’t really want to make excuses and in the last game we showed what we should have shown in the first two games, on what were bad cricket wickets on whole but we expect differently,” Simmons told members of the media on Wednesday.
PRESIDENT of the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board Azim Bassarath said the contributions of former West Indies captain Denesh Ramdin and top order batsman Lendl Simmons will be remembered, calling Ramdin the best wicket-keeper he has ever seen in the West Indies.
Both Ramdin and Simmons announced their retirement from international cricket over the past few days.
Simmons made his Windies debut in 2006 and Ramdin in 2005.
Ramdin and Simmons were part of the West Indies teams that won the 2012 and 2016 International Cricket Council T20 World Cups.
Both players have been consistent members of the TT Red Force team over the past two decades.
“I think that for both players it is sad to see them leave the international scene. I think they had two outstanding international careers,” Bassarath said.
