The International Cricket Council (ICC) is allowing a replacement for mystery spinner Sunil Narine on the West Indies team for the upcoming World Cup in New Zealand and Australia.
All the countries taking part in the tournament have already named their 15 players and Narine opted out of the tournament yesterday, stating that he was not ready to return to international cricket, after re-working his bowling action.
His place in the squad will be taken by Barbadian Carlos Brathwaite, who is currently in South Africa with the West Indies.
The right arm off-spinner was called for a suspect bowling action during the 2014 Champions League tournament in India and has missed international play since then. He has been working on his action and although he starred for the T&T Red Force, claiming six wickets for nine runs in the finals of the Nagico Cup, he explained that he was not up to full confidence.
According to tournament regulations, if a player is injured and has to be replaced, the respective board must apply to the Event Technical Committee of the World Cup for permission to replace the player.
That committee is comprised of Geoff Allardice (ICC general manager � cricket, chairman), Campbell Jamieson (ICC general manager � commercial), John Harnden (chief executive, CWC 2015 LOC), Gavin Larsen (operations manager, New Zealand), Russel Arnold and Sanjay Manjrekar (independent nominees).
West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) operations manager, Roland Holder told the T&T Guardian yesterday that Narine will be replaced and the West Indies will not go into the tournament a player short.
He said: "We have applied for a replacement for Narine and we have been told that we will be able to replace him, despite the fact that he is not injured. When he was selected we knew that something like this could happen, so we had already made it known that this was a possibility.
"We can have replacement players join the team until February 7, which is the deadline for this type of thing. We have not gotten an official word from the ICC yet because I would have to submit the name of the replacement before they make it official. However, we are going to name a replacement soon."