Vin­ode Mam­chan

Mys­tery spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine has been se­lect­ed on the West In­dies team for the lim­it­ed overs seg­ment of their up­com­ing tour to Sri Lan­ka.

This is wel­come news for the West In­dies, as Nar­ine last rep­re­sent­ed the re­gion back at the World T20 in Bangladesh last year. He was then no-balled for an al­leged il­le­gal bowl­ing ac­tion dur­ing the Cham­pi­ons Tro­phy in In­dia and since then has been out of ac­tion at the in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el while work­ing on fine tun­ing his ac­tion.

Dur­ing the pe­ri­od of ex­ile from in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et, the Queen's Park play­er has been ac­tive­ly in­volved in ODI crick­et for the Red Force and T20 crick­et for the Guyana Ama­zon War­riors.

Al­so mak­ing a re­turn to the West In­dies ODI out­fit is fast bowler Ravi Ram­paul, who has been putting in the hard work at the Na­tion­al Crick­et Cen­tre (NCC) in Trinidad with the T&T Red Force team.

The oth­er lo­cals on the team are open­er Lendl Sim­mons, mid­dle or­der bats­man Dar­ren Bra­vo and wick­et­keep­er/bats­man De­nesh Ramdin.

Of note though is the con­tin­ued ex­clu­sion of all rounders Dwayne Bra­vo and Ke­iron Pol­lard who have been over­looked for ODI crick­et, since the abort­ed tour of In­dia last Oc­to­ber. Bra­vo was at the helm of the re­gion­al team when they de­cid­ed against com­plet­ing their tour of In­dia due to a pay­ment struc­ture dis­pute with the WICB.

Im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter they were ex­clud­ed from the West In­dies ODI team for the tour of South Africa, al­though they got slot­ted in for the T20 match­es. They were al­so snubbed for the In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et Coun­cil (ICC) World Cup in New Zealand and Aus­tralia.

Re­cent­ly, there was an at­tempt by new coach Phil Sim­mons to get Bra­vo and Pol­lard in­volved in the team set up but it is un­der­stood that talks broke down due to the de­crease in match fees of­fered for Test crick­et. The play­ers were how­ev­er still in­ter­est­ed in play­ing ODI and T20 crick­et for the Caribbean side.

The West In­dies tour of Sri Lan­ka opens with the first Test at Galle on Oc­to­ber 14. They play the sec­ond Test match at Colom­bo from Oc­to­ber 20 and this will be fol­lowed by three ODI match­es and two T20 clash­es.

Re­cent­ly, the WICB changed the lead­er­ship of the Test side and Bar­ba­di­an Ja­son Hold­er will trav­el to Sri Lan­ka at the helm, re­plac­ing Ramdin who was on the job for 15 months.

Hold­er will al­so be cap­tain of the ODI side which he start­ed back in Jan­u­ary against South Africa, while St Lu­cian Dar­ren Sam­my, who led the West In­dies to a World T20 ti­tle back in 2012, will stay as cap­tain of the team for the T20 match­es.