Message Board Archives

Many dif­fer­ent things have hap­pened in sport in the last week, both on and off the field to end the year. Let’s start with crick­et —I men­tioned last week that the West In­dies’ prob­lem at the mo­ment is in our bowl­ing and so we couldn’t de­fend 315 vs In­dia. Al­though we showed some fight and de­ter­mi­na­tion and had the In­di­an fans ex­treme­ly ner­vous com­ing to the end of the game, our bowlers lacked the ex­pe­ri­ence to close it out. I am cer­tain this is some­thing both Phil Sim­mons and Kieron Pol­lard will be pay­ing close at­ten­tion to and while we showed the willpow­er to beat In­dia, we al­so des­per­ate­ly need qual­i­ty bowl­ing, which is not there at the mo­ment.

Our next se­ries is against Ire­land be­gin­ning on Jan­u­ary 7 and I ex­pect us to win com­fort­ably. But it will be in­ter­est­ing when the fi­nal squad is cho­sen, as some im­por­tant ques­tions re­main. Will Dwayne Bra­vo be brought back to bol­ster the bowl­ing? What about An­dre Rus­sell? Will he ever be fit again for the rigours of in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et? I un­der­stand Sunil Nar­ine is avail­able for the T20 se­ries against the Irish, but will he even­tu­al­ly be fit for the ODIs? The oth­er ques­tion will be should the se­lec­tors stick with this present crop of bowlers in the hope they will im­prove over the com­ing year? Whichev­er route the se­lec­tors choose, it will be a tough de­ci­sion. How­ev­er, the year has end­ed on a pos­i­tive note for Windies crick­et thanks to Sim­mons and Pol­lard.

Off the field, I read that for­mer In­di­an open­er Gau­tam Gamb­hir has crit­i­cised the In­di­an Pre­mier League (IPL) fran­chise Kings XI Pun­jab (KX­IP) for se­cur­ing the ser­vices of Shel­don Cot­trell for US$1.2M. Well, Gam­bir is no Kohli, Ten­dulkar or Gavaskar, but even by his own ad­mis­sion there were no bet­ter op­tions. If that was the case, one must ex­pect to pay a pre­mi­um price if se­cur­ing the ser­vices of a re­li­able fast bowler is the ex­pect­ed out­come. Cot­trell has been out­stand­ing this year for the West In­dies. His bowl­ing and field­ing went above and be­yond ex­pec­ta­tions and one can eas­i­ly analyse his im­prove­ment game by game. So is the mil­lion dol­lar price tag a des­per­a­tion buy? Let’s hope from a West In­di­an per­spec­tive, he makes Gam­bir choke on his words. Of equal im­por­tance is why didn’t he say the same KX­IP got a steal of a deal when get­ting Nico­las Pooran for US$591k where­as the Del­hi Cap­i­tals paid $1m for Shim­ron Het­my­er? One may sug­gest Gam­bir un­der­stands pol­i­tics very well.