T&T's all­rounder, Kieron Pol­lard has once again failed to find favour with the WICB (West In­dies Crick­et Board) as a top con­tract­ed play­er. When the list of 14 play­ers was re­vealed yes­ter­day by the WICB, Pol­lard, who has nev­er been con­tract­ed among the lead­ing play­ers, was not among those cur­rent­ly on WICB Cen­tral Re­tain­er Con­tracts. Al­so over­looked was T&T all-rounder Lendl Sim­monds. Fel­low-coun­try­men T&T's Dwayne Bra­vo, De­nesh Ramdin and Ravi Ram­paul were the on­ly T&T play­ers recog­nised good enough by the WICB to be con­tract­ed. Along with the trio of Bra­vo, Ramd­hin and Ram­paul are Shiv­nar­ine Chan­der­paul, Chris Gayle, Ramnaresh Sar­wan, Dar­ren Sam­my, Jerome Tay­lor, Sulie­man Benn, Dave Bernard, Nars­ingh De­onar­ine, Travis Dowl­in, Bren­dan Nash and Ke­mar Roach. WICB will be of­fer­ing the 14 play­ers Cen­tral Re­tain­er Con­tracts for the pe­ri­od Oc­to­ber 1, 2010 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2011 and will al­so of­fer ten play­ers De­vel­op­men­tal Con­tracts for the same pe­ri­od.

Spin­ner Sulie­man Benn and all­rounder Dar­ren Sam­my were the big per­form­ers among the 14 play­ers who held WICB Cen­tral Re­tain­er Con­tracts for the year Oc­to­ber 1, 2009, to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2010, ac­cord­ing to the WICB Crick­et and Se­lec­tion Com­mit­tees which met re­cent­ly to re­view the per­for­mances of play­ers on WICB re­tain­er con­tracts. In their re­view, the joint com­mit­tee ef­fort found that left-arm spin­ner Benn moved from hav­ing tak­en 29 wick­ets in the 2008-2009 sea­son to a grand to­tal 40 wick­ets in the 2009-2010 sea­son in the three forms of the game at the high­est lev­el–Tests, One Day In­ter­na­tion­als and In­ter­na­tion­al Twen­ty20s. The Bar­ba­di­an's cu­mu­la­tive av­er­age al­so came down sig­nif­i­cant­ly from 46.12 runs per wick­et in 2008-2009 to 27.7 runs per wick­et in 2009-2010.

Sam­my in­creased his wick­et haul from 24 wick­ets to 32 wick­ets but he made sig­nif­i­cant progress on im­prov­ing his av­er­age–mov­ing from 53.16 runs per wick­et to 29.13 runs per wick­et (all three for­mats of the game). Chris Gayle's stats for 2009-2010 re­mained most­ly on par with his stats for the pre­vi­ous year. In­ci­den­tal­ly the trio of Benn, Sam­my and Gayle have been nom­i­nat­ed by the ICC for awards in the LG ICC Awards 2010. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, vet­er­an mid­dle or­der bats­man Shiv­nar­ine Chan­der­paul and Gayle are the on­ly two West In­di­ans ranked in the top ten per­form­ers in the world in the ICC rank­ings for bats­men and bowlers.

Chan­der­paul is ranked fifth on the list of top Test bats­men, hav­ing slipped from his num­ber one rank­ing while Gayle is al­so ranked fifth on the list of top ODI bats­men. Chan­der­paul is ranked 10th on the ODI list. There are no bowlers in the top ten of the Re­liance Mo­bile ICC rank­ings for Tests or ODIs.