Whilst casually running some errands, an ardent cricket supporter shouted to me, “Colin let me hear what you have to say about the 'Red Farce'; they made you eat your words and they beat them Jamaicans”.
I calmly replied, “Great, superb, well done; I am so happy and overjoyed like all T&T cricket fans and just, by the way, it’s Red Force.” A fan had suggested to me in his frustration to rename the team "Red Farce".
However, while I am overjoyed by the victory, let us examine the match and put things into context. Kudos to the touring selectors for getting the balance of the team right this time. You may recall in the last match against the Leeward Islands Hurricanes, the Red Force technical staff had sacrificed a bowler to pick an extra batsman and skipper Denesh Ramdin was not keeping wicket.
Consequently, the opposition walloped us all over the field scoring over 400 runs and with the extra batsman, we totalled 252 and 96. In this game against Jamaica, we decided to pick three seamers and two spinners but more importantly, we had five specialist bowlers at our disposal rather than four to get the opposition out twice, hopefully for under 200.
Two important factors had to also be taken into consideration. Ramdin was behind the stumps which would give the bowlers some confidence and secondly, young Khary Pierre was drafted into the starting 11. Pierre is a young man who gives 150 per cent in all departments of the game. He is not, at this juncture, a world class left arm spinner but he just came back from India with the Windies team and he is learning his trade but what a fighter he is.
In fact, Pierre ended the game with match figures of five for 36 and scored 46 and 35 to top the present batting averages. He proved a wonderful foil for Imran Khan. Because of these fundamental bowling changes, we were able to dismiss the Jamaicans twice for 112 and 167 thereby completing a comfortable victory by 157 runs.
Please do not think that I am completely satisfied with the victory. Overjoyed yes but satisfied no. One victory does not make everything right. Firstly, we were victorious against the team last in the standings; if we did not win, it would have been a disaster of enormous proportions. My major concern at the moment is in our batting. In six innings we have crossed 250 just once. Even against the Jamaicans, our scores of 203 and 233 did not flatter us.
The opposition had two main bowlers: the extremely promising Oshane Thomas and the veteran Nikita Miller. One would have thought that if our batsmen were able to keep those two at bay, we would have gotten closer to the 300-mark. When one compares our totals to the leaders - the Guyana Jaguars - they have scored from five completed innings over 250 four times. Of those four, one score was a mammoth 548 versus a Barbados attack with Kemar Roach, Jason Holder, Ashley Nurse, Miguel Cummins and Jomel Warrican, all supposedly Windies bowlers at different formats of the game.
Some of our senior batsmen have batted six times each and are averaging 10.33, 13.50 and 16.50, simply not good enough. As I indicated before, good players don’t just turn bad overnight so there must be a problem somewhere. Is it the batsmen are not working on their game hard enough? Could it be that the batsmen are not taking the net sessions as seriously as they ought to? Are the batsmen not being given enough time in the nets to work on their technique? Is the practice environment conducive to our batsmen making them work hard enough? Do all our players have the pride instilled in them to represent the Red, White and Black? Are the batsmen motivated enough?
I certainly can’t answer those questions but we now come up against a Barbados Pride team that is also under performing. At the time of writing, I do not know the Barbados squad but they are 1.8 points ahead of us in the standings. They are full of Windies players but with the first Test versus England carded for January 23, they may have a weakened team. On the other hand, T&T will miss Darren Bravo and Shannon Gabriel. However, if we don’t bring our "A" game, we may very well be chasing this match against our fiercest rivals within recent years.
So let us hope for more improvement especially in the batting department from the Red Force. As far as I am concerned, we still have a lot of work to do as we have not turned the corner just yet. It would be naive for the technical staff to think that way as if we lose, we would have gone backwards again and the fans will not accept mediocrity anymore.
Editor’s note: The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and do not reflect the views of any organisation of which he is a stakeholder.