WAL­TER AL­IBEY

West In­dies coach Phil Sim­mons ad­mit­ted yes­ter­day that his de­ci­sion to ban pop­u­lar crick­et com­men­ta­tor Mo­hammed from in­ter­view­ing the re­gion­al play­ers pri­or to the start of the sec­ond Test against Aus­tralia in Mel­bourne a few days ago, may have been a bit harsh, but he had to do it to pro­tect his play­ers.

His com­ments to­tal­ly con­tra­dict a re­port by the West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) on Tues­day which stat­ed that there was no ban on Mo­hammed. Ac­cord­ing to the re­port by the WICB man­age­ment, "the team ful­ly ap­pre­ci­ates and un­der­stands the im­por­tance of the me­dia to­wards pro­vid­ing in­for­ma­tion on the game as well as the growth and de­vel­op­ment of the sport."

But yes­ter­day on i95.5FM ra­dio pro­gramme Sim­mons said he does not hold grudges and will ap­proach Mo­hammed, whom he has known from Un­der-19 crick­et, to tell him how he feels about what had tran­spired and sort things out.

Sim­mons was slight­ed by com­ments made by Mo­hammed that his team was not train­ing with the amount of in­ten­si­ty as their op­po­nents the Aus­tralians.

Mo­hammed, who works as a ra­dio com­men­ta­tor for the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (ABC), was im­me­di­ate­ly barred from con­duct­ing in­ter­views af­ter Sim­mons con­tact­ed pro­duc­er of the ABC com­men­tary team Adam White to in­form him that he did not want Mo­hammed to in­ter­view any mem­ber of the West In­dies team.

Sim­mons ex­plained that he re­act­ed to what he con­sid­ered to be mis­lead­ing in­for­ma­tion by Mo­hammed to the Caribbean pub­lic about his team's prepa­ra­tion which was com­pared to Aus­tralia's.

Ac­cord­ing to Sim­mons, he felt that Mo­hammed had a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion in Aus­tralia as it re­gards the team back to the Caribbean, but he felt that the com­ments by Mo­hammed had in­stead been ir­re­spon­si­ble as it did not re­flect ex­act­ly what was hap­pen­ing with the team.

He ex­plained that Mo­hammed at­tend­ed one of three days of train­ing yet made com­ments to gen­er­alise on the over­all train­ing of the team.

"On day one we did bat­ting for about an hour and the day be­fore we did bowl­ing and field­ing, but Mo­hammed was not there those days," Sim­mons ex­plained.

He not­ed that the play­ers have been work­ing re­al­ly hard to im­prove their per­for­mances and to hear Mo­hammed in an in­ter­view de­scribed the train­ing as not in­ten­sive as the Aus­tralians was un­fair.

"Mo­hammed did not even ask a ques­tion about what was go­ing on and why. He had Court­ney Walsh, Curt­ly Am­brose and my­self there to ask, but he re­fused to ask a ques­tion and rather give his own opin­ion," Sim­mons said.

Mo­hammed's com­ments have had a neg­a­tive im­pact on the play­ers go­ing in­to the sec­ond Test which the re­gion­al team lost by 177 runs. How­ev­er, Sim­mons has said that he has seen some fight in the play­ers in the bat­ting and bowl­ing ar­eas.

"In the first Test they strug­gled to make 200 runs and al­so bowled 14 no balls. In the sec­ond Test we were on tar­get with the amount of runs we want­ed in the first ses­sion, but we did not car­ry on," Sim­mons ex­plained.

The West In­dies will face their Aus­tralian coun­ter­parts in the third Test from Sat­ur­day in Syd­ney and Sim­mons is ex­pect­ing to see an im­proved per­for­mance.

He said he will see Mo­hammed dur­ing the train­ing ses­sion where he in­tends to talk to him.