Alvin Corneal

I sup­pose that I had been led to­wards con­tin­ued sup­port for the T20 World Crick­et Cham­pi­ons, if on­ly be­cause there was em­phat­ic com­mit­ment by play­ers, staff and ad­min­is­tra­tion, that our in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et rat­ing had be­gun.

How could any­one view the names of the cho­sen play­ers and doubt the ex­perts, whose sup­port al­so seemed to have been pos­i­tive? Were we the vic­tims of an op­ti­cal il­lu­sion when we saw al­most all these play­ers per­form­ing out­stand­ing­ly in the world crick­et band­wag­on trav­el­ling through In­dia, South Africa, Aus­tralia and Ban­glka­desh, pro­duc­ing some scin­til­lat­ing stroke-play, hit­ting six­es which set crowds jump­ing and some­times hus­tling to get out of the way of balls which chal­lenged their safe­ty in the

sta­di­um seats.

The prog­no­sis made by the play­ers in­di­cat­ed that the team was well knit, well coached, and im­prove­ment at all as­pects of the game would lead the WI back to­wards the top of World Crick­et.

Many of the cur­rent play­ers had been to Aus­tralia at dif­fer­ent times over the past decade and sure­ly would have en­joyed the ex­pe­ri­ence of read­ing the play­ing con­di­tions in every state.

How­ev­er, when skip­per Dar­ren Sam­my won the toss in the first ODI, judg­ing from the his­to­ry of the Perth wick­et, few would have de­cid­ed to bat, not even Michael Clarke, the Aus­tralian Cap­tain.

Sam­my made the de­ci­sion, prob­a­bly with the sup­port of the tech­ni­cal staff and se­nior play­ers, (that is an as­sump­tion), de­spite the fact that this par­tic­u­lar wick­et had a bounce some six inch­es high­er than the oth­ers in Aus­tralia, and added to that a sur­face which was clear­ly juiced with mois­ture.

Even if I as­sumed that there was ex­treme con­fi­dence in our bats­men scor­ing runs un­der any con­di­tions, would it not have been a bet­ter op­tion to give our bowlers the op­por­tu­ni­ty to use the wick­et in the con­di­tion when it favoured bowlers like Ke­mar Roach, as op­posed to spin­ners, Nar­ine in­clud­ed.

It is im­pos­si­ble to de­scribe the aw­ful de­fi­cien­cies of our bats­men, who, in­ci­den­tal­ly are rat­ed among the top twen­ty in the world, all of whom should have been aware of the ex­tra bounce and move­ment off the seam.

One be­gins to won­der what is next, al­though the venues are ex­pect­ed to be more suit­ed to the man­ner in which they are ac­cus­tomed to play­ing their game.

The skip­per sim­ply shrugged off the di­a­bol­i­cal dis­play as a bad day and promis­es to bounce back, but which of us dare to re­build their con­fi­dence af­ter see­ing this de­ba­cle.

My con­so­la­tion is that it can­not get worse. The pride and de­ter­mi­na­tion of the com­mit­ted play­ers will have pre­pared the shock treat­ment which a bad day re­ceives.

My gut feel­ing is that the time for ad­just­ing the twelve hour time change, in terms of sleep­ing, eat­ing, and train­ing hours may have been the de­ter­rent, and I ea­ger­ly await the next few per­for­mances.