West In­dies Head Coach Phil Sim­mons lam­bast­ed the stan­dard of play cur­rent­ly be­ing seen in the WICB Pro­fes­sion­al Crick­et League say­ing that it does noth­ing to pre­pare young crick­eters for life on the in­ter­na­tion­al cir­cuit.

Sim­mons was speak­ing to re­porters on Tues­day at Kens­ing­ton Oval af­ter the West In­dies train­ing ses­sion there. He not­ed that the type of loose shots be­ing played and the bad balls be­ing bowled by the West In­dies play­ers were preva­lent in the Four Day tour­na­ment. While the play­ers would be able to get away with that type of play in the re­gion­al tour­na­ment, they couldn't on the in­ter­na­tion­al scene.

"You watch the scores, for in­stance if Bishoo had bowled those 50 odd overs in a four-day game he would have had 20 wick­ets. So that is one of the things that we need to ad­dress, "I think the biggest thing for the young play­ers be­cause of the lev­el of our first class crick­et, when they come up here is to un­der­stand the sit­u­a­tion and how I have to play in this sit­u­a­tion is de­ter­mined by what the team needs and the score­board. These are things that you have to keep try­ing to teach them be­fore it sinks in," said Sim­mons.

Sim­mons point­ed out that many of the young play­ers were now start­ing to learn about Test crick­et, which is a ma­jor step up from the type of first-class crick­et that is cur­rent­ly be­ing played in the West In­dies.

"They are en­thu­si­as­tic, they want to learn and then you have the four ex­pe­ri­enced guys who need to make their pres­ence felt in this Test match com­ing up. I this is the start of where we need to go," said Sim­mons.

The coach ad­mit­ted that he thought that the West In­dies bats­men all got out reck­less­ly on the fi­nal day of the sec­ond Test match in An­tigua. He thought that the sit­u­a­tion at the time called for the West In­dies to bat for a longer pe­ri­od of time in or­der to put the game out of Eng­land's hands.Sim­mons not­ed that ide­al­ly he would love to see much faster pitch­es be­ing pre­pared in the Caribbean say­ing that 'who can bat will bat and who can bowl will get wick­ets.'

"The pitch in An­tigua got bet­ter as it went on. I think that if we had bowled bet­ter in the sec­ond ses­sion of the first day we would have had a bet­ter chance of win­ning the game. We didn't and it went away," said Sim­mons.The coach set­tled fans' fears on the ex­tent of Ja­son Hold­er's in­jury when he said that it wasn't too bad as first feared. Sim­mons not­ed that Hold­er has re­cov­ered well and they will see how he fares af­ter bowl­ing in the nets to­day and to­mor­row.

Bar­ba­dos Ad­vo­cate