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Saturday, July 5, 2025

Absence of key players can hurt WI, say Smith, Dravid

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20150201

West In­dies have strug­gled with tur­moil in the build-up the World Cup. Dwayne Bra­vo was sacked as ODI cap­tain and left out of the squad along with all­rounder Kieron Pol­lard, and Sunil Nar­ine has with­drawn from the squad. For­mer In­dia cap­tain Rahul Dravid and for­mer South Africa cap­tain Graeme Smith re­flect on West In­dies' prospects in the tour­na­ment.

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Windies' dif­fi­cult build-up

Dravid: I think there's not a lot of sta­bil­i­ty in the team. If you look at the team there is a lot of tal­ent, but I don't know whether they are or­gan­ised enough.

Smith: They bring a lot of char­ac­ter to the game. When you look at their team hav­ing left out high-qual­i­ty play­ers for be­hind-the-scenes stuff, it's dis­ap­point­ing be­cause you lose out on play­ers that peo­ple love to watch.

Hold­er as cap­tain

Dravid: Till six months ago, he would have prob­a­bly been think­ing, "I'd like to be able to play the World Cup as a play­er." Till six-eight months ago he would have not even been sure of his place in the squad.

Smith: With every­thing that's go­ing on, man­ag­ing per­son­al­i­ties and get­ting the best out of them is go­ing to be a chal­lenge. So how he gets them to play as a team is go­ing to be unique for him and it's ask­ing a lot out of a young fast bowler.

Chris Gayle's im­por­tance

Dravid: He's got the abil­i­ty, it's just a ques­tion of whether he's in the right frame of mind and he's phys­i­cal­ly fit enough to be able to do that over a long tour­na­ment.

Smith: You could come up against him, he could get a hun­dred and that could beat you. That's the chal­lenge you face with some­one like him. He's a pow­er­house play­er.

How far the side can go

Dravid: I think they'll make the quar­ter­fi­nals and they'll be a dan­ger­ous team. Teams may not nec­es­sar­i­ly want to play them in the quar­ter­fi­nals be­cause they've got the kind of play­ers who on their day can win you a game.

Smith: I'm go­ing to take a fly­er and say they're not go­ing to go through. I'm go­ing to back one of the min­nows to qual­i­fy head­ing in. Just on their day if they don't wake up, they can eas­i­ly be beat­en.


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