BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos – Ex-West In­dies fast bowler Tony Gray has crit­i­cised the se­lec­tion of Keemo Paul in the Test squad for New Zealand, con­tend­ing the all-rounder should have been re­placed by stroke-mak­er Shai Hope whom he has la­belled a “great tal­ent”.

The 22-year-old Paul was last week named in a 15-man squad for the two-Test se­ries while Hope, 26, was axed fol­low­ing a poor run of form.

Gray ar­gued Paul, who has played on­ly three Tests, was not well suit­ed to the longest for­mat as he did not pos­sess the pa­tience re­quired as a seam­er.

“The on­ly prob­lem I have [with the squad] is Keemo Paul,” said Gray, whose five Tests and 25 One-Day In­ter­na­tion­als came be­tween 1986 and 1991.

“Keemo Paul to me at this point in time is not suit­ed to play Test crick­et. [He is] too in­con­sis­tent with his bowl­ing, he tries too many things and he can­not work to a game plan and Test crick­et is work­ing to a game plan, hav­ing the stock de­liv­er­ies, [be­ing] pa­tient but al­so hav­ing de­liv­er­ies that will take wick­ets.

“He has wick­et-tak­ing de­liv­er­ies but the thing about him is that he is not pa­tient. His bat­ting has de­clined too.”

Gray, the T&T Crick­et Board’s chair­man of se­lec­tors, con­tend­ed if Hope was ex­clud­ed from the 15-man squad, he should have been among the six re­serves which formed part of the tour­ing par­ty.

The right-han­der has av­er­aged just 19 from 17 Tests in­side the last 2-1/2 years and strug­gled on the re­cent tour of Eng­land with an av­er­age of 17 from six in­nings.

“You have enough seam­ers there for two Test match­es [and] you have (Ros­ton) Chase there who is an ef­fi­cient bowler [and] gets wick­ets at Test lev­el,” Gray con­tin­ued.

“You need to have Shai Hope around. If you’re not pick­ing him in the Test squad, you’ve got to pick him in the re­serves. But you’ve got to work with him [be­cause] he’s such a great tal­ent.”

West In­dies suf­fered a 2-1 de­feat on the tour of Eng­land last Ju­ly, with the poor bat­ting ly­ing at fault for the two de­feats in the fi­nal match­es at Man­ches­ter.

And Gray said he was pleased se­lec­tors had not re­spond­ed emo­tion­al­ly by “chop­ping and chang­ing”, as there was still a need to con­tin­ue build­ing a team es­pe­cial­ly with the cur­rent lim­i­ta­tions on the de­vel­op­ment of play­ers.

“We have to be con­trolled in our emo­tions in look­ing at this team [be­cause] we need to have con­ti­nu­ity. We can­not be chop­ping and chang­ing,” Gray told Star­com Ra­dio’s Ma­son and Guest crick­et show.

“We have to un­der­stand too be­cause of the in­ept­ness or low stan­dard of our crick­et, that play­ers will take longer to de­vel­op. So a play­er at about 29 is now de­vel­op­ing be­cause we’re see­ing the dele­tion of a lot of things that helped West In­dies bats­men to de­vel­op in their years of dom­i­nance [in the past].

“We don’t have Coun­ty crick­et again … to learn the in­tri­ca­cies of bat­ting in dif­fer­ent bat­ting con­di­tions, in dif­fer­ent weath­er con­di­tions.

“We have delet­ed the faster pitch­es here in the West In­dies so it’s one type of pitch that we have … so we have to be as­tute when it comes to se­lect­ing play­ers.”

He added: “So you have to give play­ers time to grow or … we’ll con­tin­ue to chop and change play­ers. We’re look­ing for stars but we’re look­ing for stars too quick­ly and this is a pe­ri­od of process-ori­ent­ed type of at­ti­tudes.”

West In­dies face New Zealand in the first Test start­ing De­cem­ber 3 in Hamil­ton be­fore clash­ing with the hosts in the sec­ond Test in Welling­ton eight days lat­er.

CMC

Keemo Paul (left) cel­e­brates a wick­et with Shai Hope.