Dear Editor,
It is very disheartening to see the non-selection of the following players in WI T20 World Cup 2021 Squad: Romario Shepherd, Sherfane Rutherford, Gudakesh Motie (Raw deal again!) and Carlos Brathwaite (won the last World Cup).
These players have excelled for the past three years and their records are better than half of the team selected. It begs the question why do you play in a competition, do well and then for some mysterious reason you are not selected.
How ridiculous and unfortunate for these players!
G Motie continues to top the wicket-taking category, excel and yet not selected. Sheppard and Rutherford have showed great improvement and maturity in this year’s CPL thus far and yet again, they cannot be selected. Brathwaite is a proven match winner who has the ability to do it again. Yes, he can do it again!
We have a West Indies team with at least half the players not selected on merit and only chosen by some insular favouritism as their performance and fitness continue to be way below par. Makes you wonder if the WI team is now an employment agency for the boys, win, lose or draw?
Chris Gayle should have retired two years now. Gayle has been a great servant to West Indies cricket and on the World stage but the longer he drags on, he will deny one of the top players mentioned above their rightful place. Do the honourable thing, retire now, and give your place to one of the above please.
These dubious selections are the perfect example of why West Indies cricket is stuck in a rot for such a long time. Most top teams in the world select their best players available, youthful, promising and those in their prime. Their skilful talent and all round performance warrant their selection to build an invincible team.
Alzarri Joseph is also a perfect example of another dreadful omission. It is sad that we continue to recycle ‘dead weight floaters’, panic hitting and hoping for the best. It simply will not work anymore.
Cricket is high tech science now and top World teams will figure you out. Time for radical changes and revolutionary thinking in our strategies. Time for a new modern day approach. Time to play the game with ‘brains’ clinical bowling, batting and fielding plans, and not trying to ‘voop’ our way out of everything.
Except for most of the foreign-based players, only a few of our batsmen in this year’s T20 CPL (Caribbean Premier League) 2021 tried to build their innings starting with a ‘single’ . More sad, is that we have the skilled players who can walk into any World team but not the right management to select, nurture and utilise their natural talent at home here in the West Indies to build a great team so we can return to top flight.
Kieron Pollard is an astute, dynamic and knowledgeable captain but he will face a Herculean task in the ‘Group of Death’. As a former top WI cricket batting legend once said: "Top teams take an ordinary player and turn him into a great player, West Indies takes a great player and turn him into an ordinary player"!
Time has come to drop the selectors.
Captain Harry
Williamsville