ST JOHN’S, An­tigua – Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) pres­i­dent Dr Kishore Shal­low has ad­mit­ted that he would love to see T20 star Nicholas Pooran along with some of the re­gion’s best crick­eters play Test crick­et for the West In­dies.

Speak­ing dur­ing an in­ter­view on WESN TV on Thurs­day, Dr Shal­low said he be­lieved play­ers such as Pooran and Shai Hope could help trans­form the for­tunes of the Test team, which lan­guish­es eighth in the ICC rank­ings ahead of on­ly min­nows Bangladesh, Ire­land, Afghanistan and Zim­bab­we.

Last month, the 29-year-old Pooran was named Wis­den’s Lead­ing T20 Crick­eter in the World af­ter a sen­sa­tion­al 2024 where he scored a record 2331 T20 runs scored at an av­er­age of 40.

Pooran al­so smashed 139 six­es to eclipse Chris Gayle’s pre­vi­ous record of 135 six­es set in 2015.

“I’m very hope­ful that even­tu­al­ly Nicky P will be back in the One Day In­ter­na­tion­al set­up as well. That would be a good first step, and then the likes of Shai Hope and the oth­ers,” Dr Shal­low said.

“I think they have all said to Daren Sam­my that they would like to play Test crick­et and hope­ful­ly, we could see our tal­ent pool ex­pand as a re­sult of that and it will have greater depth in terms of our play­ers to choose from.

“It would cer­tain­ly help us, and I think that one of the things that has af­fect­ed us in the past with our rank­ings is the un­avail­abil­i­ty of play­ers from time to time, which is why Daren Sam­my has em­barked on this ap­proach to have these dis­cus­sions well in ad­vance of se­ries so we can have more com­mit­ment about play­ers be­ing avail­able more con­sis­tent­ly,” he added.

CMC