KINGSTOWN – Fol­low­ing a dis­ap­point­ing T20I se­ries loss to Bangladesh, West In­dies T20 cap­tain Rov­man Pow­ell be­lieves the play­ers must use the up­com­ing time off to recharge and prop­er­ly pre­pare for 2025.

Bangladesh, who are ranked ninth in the world, swept the fourth-ranked Windies 3-0, to hand them their third suc­ces­sive T20I se­ries de­feat and sec­ond at home, fol­low­ing loss­es to Sri Lan­ka and Eng­land.

In an in­ter­view with re­porters at the Arnos Vale ground in St Vin­cent on Thurs­day (De­cem­ber 19), Pow­ell said af­ter a stel­lar start to the year he was dis­ap­point­ed with the way in which the West In­dies end­ed 2024.

He said with a lengthy lay­off be­fore their next T20 se­ries against Eng­land in June, the team need­ed to do some in­tro­spec­tion.

“All good things must come to an end, all bad things must come to an end al­so.

“It’s just dis­ap­point­ing that we’ve fin­ished the year so bad­ly as a T20 group, but when you look on the du­ra­tion of the year, we have played some good T20 crick­et, just not for long enough pe­ri­ods,” a vis­i­bly frus­trat­ed Pow­ell said.

“The good thing is that we have some time off. When things are not go­ing ac­cord­ing to plan you want to back off just a lit­tle bit in­stead of keep press­ing.

“We have four, five months off, you know if we use that time wise­ly and work on our game as in­di­vid­u­als and we try to put it to­geth­er col­lec­tive­ly as a team then we should be ok,” the skip­per added.

De­spite the re­sult, Pow­ell said the fu­ture of T20 crick­et in the re­gion was bright.

He ad­mit­ted that while the team had not per­formed to ex­pec­ta­tions, he said it was not due to a lack of tal­ent.

“We still have a good crop of T20 crick­eters in the re­gion, it’s just for us to come to­geth­er and sharp­en what ar­eas we need to work on.

“I think as a T20 group we will be ok, it’s just a tough loss, but those things do hap­pen in the na­ture of the sport that we play,” Pow­ell said.

“It’s been re­al­ly an in­dif­fer­ent year. We start­ed the year bril­liant­ly. We have made some strides as a team, but to be hon­est, I think our last two or three T20 se­ries those strides have been re­duced in a sense that we haven’t done jus­tice to our­selves as a T20 team in the last few se­ries.”

CMC