All yuh retiring players at 34 now?

FORMER West Indies batsman, Bryan Davis, said the selection of 36 year old Devon Smith on the West Indies 13-man squad for the upcoming three-match Test series against Sri Lanka is a backward step because the opener has repeatedly failed at international level.

Smith last played a Test match for West Indies in 2015 when England toured the Caribbean. Smith has played 38 Test matches, scoring 1,593 runs at a mediocre average of 24.50. He has scored just one century and six fifties.

“You bringing a man with an average of 24 at 36 years of age? He is older than his average,” he said.

The West Indies selectors, led by Courtney Browne, said they were left with no choice but to select Smith after a brilliant Regional Four-Day season last year. Smith amassed a record breaking 1,095 runs at an average of 84 with six hundreds for the Windward Islands Hurricanes.

Davis said he would have preferred to give a younger player a chance, as Smith did not achieve enough during his career

Shane Omari Dowrich (born 30 October 1991) is a Barbadian international cricketer who plays as a wicket-keeper. He has featured for the West Indies, Barbados along with CPL teams St Kitts and Nevis Patriots and Barbados Tridents in his cricketing career.

In his 1839 compendium American Slavery As It Is, abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld indicates that slaveholders used the term “unprofitable” to describe disabled human chattel (pp. 132-33). However, “useless” could also denote a failure to live up to expected duties for a particular social role; in the case of slaves, this might be their ability to perform manual labor, to reproduce and add to a master’s labor force, or to be disciplined and controlled (Hackford, 2004). On a more personal level, slaveholders could have used the term to describe a slave who did not meet a master’s individual expectations for behavior, physical appearance, and performance. Tensions between goals of profit, production, control, and the individual desires of planters created a number of contradictions in the ways planters assessed disability and “uselessness” in their laborers.

All yuh retiring players at 34 now?

Desmond Haynes, the former West Indies opening batsman, is seeking pounds 66,000 in damages after being left out of the home series against Australia earlier this year.

Haynes is suing the President of the West Indies Board of Control and the Barbados Association for loss of earnings after being ruled ineligible for selection. His lawyers have filed an affidavit at the Barbados High Court in Bridgetown, detailing his case.

Haynes is also seeking compensation after his contract with Western Province in South Africa was aborted. He claims he also lost earnings with Middlesex and that his reputation was damaged.

The 39-year-old was not considered to face Australia after he opted to play for Western Province instead of touring India with the West Indies last October and then returned home from South Africa too late to play in all five Red Stripe Cup matches. The WICBC had ruled he should play in those domestic games to be eligible for the Australian series. Haynes returned two days late after asking for "exceptional circumstances" to be taken into account. The WICBC refused his request.

He is older than average