ROSEAU, Do­mini­ca – West In­dies head coach Daren Sam­my has main­tained that his team se­lec­tion is dri­ven by da­ta and not emo­tion and that he has no bias to­wards play­ers from any re­gion in the Caribbean.

Sam­my made the com­ments dur­ing a re­cent in­ter­view on QFM Do­mini­ca, where ques­tions were raised about the ex­clu­sion of Do­mini­cans Kavem Hodge and Al­ick Athanaze for the up­com­ing three-match Test se­ries against Aus­tralia.

The 26-year-old Athanaze has played 13 Tests and scored 627 runs at an av­er­age of 25.08 with four half-cen­turies, while Hodge, 32, has scored 556 runs in 11 Test match­es at an av­er­age of 25.27 with one cen­tu­ry and three half-cen­turies.

While both play­ers fea­tured in the last Test se­ries against Pak­istan in Jan­u­ary, Sam­my ex­plained that their re­cent per­for­mances did not mer­it them a place in the West In­dies’ 15-man squad.

“I had the an­a­lysts dive in­to the top three teams in the world and the dif­fer­ent bat­ting po­si­tions, what the best of the top three are do­ing in those dif­fer­ent po­si­tions, the roles they are play­ing and then we com­pared them to ours and what we are do­ing.

“Dur­ing that last Test World Cham­pi­onship [cy­cle], Kavem I think scored 500 runs at an av­er­age of 25. As Do­mini­cans we want our play­ers to per­form well, but we must not get emo­tion­al,” Sam­my said.

“If there is one thing you must know about me, com­ing from a small is­land, com­ing from Saint Lu­cia, you know you hear of the talk of the in­su­lar­i­ty and all this thing. It is one thing I will not do.

“You watch my record as a cap­tain, as a coach now in the CPL. If it’s one place you will see every sin­gle per­son from the Caribbean play it is in Saint Lu­cia, so I don’t bring my emo­tions in my de­ci­sion mak­ing.

“Had I done that, prob­a­bly Hodge and Al­ick would have been there as a Wind­ward Is­lander, but that’s not how I op­er­ate. I’m here for West In­dies crick­et,” he fur­ther added.

De­spite them be­ing dropped, Sam­my said it was not the end of their crick­et­ing ca­reers.

He point­ed out that they had fea­tured for West In­dies ‘A’ in the re­cent se­ries against South Africa ‘A’.

“If you no­tice, these guys just played in the ‘A’ team se­ries, so they’ve not been dis­card­ed, just that at this mo­ment, the di­rec­tion that the team is go­ing, the roles that we see from the da­ta col­lect­ed that is re­quired to play, they just don’t fit that role at that mo­ment. How­ev­er, it is not the end of the road for them.

“I think we’re do­ing Hodge and Al­ick a dis­ser­vice by glo­ri­fy­ing an av­er­age of 25 in Test crick­et, think­ing that my­self and Miles and Ja­mal have some per­son­al vendet­ta against any play­er,” Sam­my said.

“We are try­ing to cre­ate an en­vi­ron­ment that breeds suc­cess, breeds ex­cel­lence and we need to keep on chal­leng­ing, and it shows where our crick­et is right now, when play­ers av­er­ag­ing be­low 35 seem un­drop­pable in our sys­tem and that shows how poor our sys­tem is, for us to be re­al­ly talk­ing about a 25 av­er­age…that will not bring us suc­cess.”

CMC