As the new year is upon us, so is the Caribbean cricket season with the visiting Irish here to test our improvement in the white ball game. As I predicted, the West indies easily swept them aside in the first ODI and unless complacency steps in, I expect skipper Kieron Pollard and his team to make a clean sweep of their opposition.
Perhaps more importantly, Thursday will mark the start of the new Regional 4-Day Tournament and like all local cricket fans, I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that with the start of a new decade, our Red Force team will be able to win the tournament. It is important to note that we have not won since 2006 and the last few years have been nothing short of disastrous.
It was recently reported that the President of the T&T Cricket Board has heaped praise on his executive for getting new initiatives on board and that investors are coming back into cricket. Interestingly, he mentioned that the so-called “detractors” who were keen to hurt the board, didn’t care about our cricketers and they suffered as a result.
Unfortunately, I am not into politics and I can only judge what is placed in front of me. When I look back over the last 5 to six years, the planning and structure of our cricket for tournaments can only be described as abysmal. We repeatedly went into tournaments with very little hope of winning them.
We kept losing year after year and it was business as usual; perhaps hoping for divine intervention and that one day we will suddenly win the four-day tournament. Thankfully, someone woke up and changes were made last year and although we did not win the tournament, there was a marked improvement in our game. I was keen to see some form of post mortem at the end of the regional series last year, but there was none made public from my knowledge. I was interested in knowing how it can be possible to defeat the champions but fail miserably against some of the other teams with far less ability than ours.
In the recently concluded Super 50 tournament, we failed to reach the final, again, and when one revisits the games, our fielding, in particular, our catching was horrible. We weren’t aggressive enough in the field and our bowlers at times seemed to have lost the plot. It appeared that there was not enough guidance on the field to galvanise the team when the chips were down. When you look at the body language of the West Indies Emerging players compared to our team’s body language, one could easily understand why the emerging players won.
Then, I had to listen to an awful excuse about us not having fast bowlers and the coach not getting his way with the selectors. Oh, please give me a break. We played bad cricket especially against the Leeward Islands Hurricanes and we lost - simple but true so stop the foolish excuses!
If I am to believe the President of the TTCB that cricket is on the up, I expect he would have given all the resources needed for the team to do well and win the 2020 tournament. I see there were a couple of trial matches which is good but I am unsure how many times the squad practised together outside of the games to iron out all the flaws with both the batsmen and bowlers? What about our fielding? Have we worked on our catching both close to the bat and in the deep? I am hoping the board has been monitoring all of the work being done by the technical staff as the buck stops with them.
The team itself is loaded with talent and with Darren Bravo seemingly back to his best and enjoying his cricket once again, I am expecting record-breaking runs from him. Being installed as captain will add to his responsibilities but I anticipate that he will adopt an aggressive nature to his captaincy. He must accept nothing less than 100% from his charges and those who may have the talent but fail to give 100%, invite them to watch from the stands.
Based on the North v South game and the trials, some players have forced their way into the team. Young Isaiah Rajah is a player I like. He appears to have so much time to play the ball but he must turn half-centuries into hundreds; too many times he gets out in the seventies and eighties. Joshua Da Silva and Yannick Cariah are both eager to do well and they know what the winning feeling is like having won the Super 50 tournament. Da Silva looks like one for the future and this tournament could be a turning point in his career.
Cariah has to come good as he has been around for a long time; so too Kyle Hope who has represented the West Indies but has failed to light up the regional series. It is time he is given an ultimatum to score heavily or the selectors may as well give the chance to a youngster in Cephas Cooper. Young opener Jeremy Solozano has also been knocking on the door and the team must turn good starts into big scores.
Bowling maybe our weak link. I expect Imran Khan will spearhead the attack with the other spinners - Akeal Hosein and Bryan Charles. Terrance Hinds is an interesting selection - he is aggressive with both bat and ball which is what I like, but he is raw at this level and I expect coach Mervyn Dillon to handle him astutely.
Can we win the tournament? Certainly! We have the talent but the technical staff must manage the strengths and weaknesses of the team well. Our players must show the fight and aggression to win which has been absent for some time.
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.