ST JOHN’S, An­tigua – West In­dies Women are des­per­ate­ly hop­ing to se­cure an in­ter­na­tion­al tour in or­der to gain valu­able match prac­tice, be­fore they trav­el to Sri Lan­ka in De­cem­ber for the cru­cial ICC World Cup qual­i­fi­er.

Though the Caribbean side toured Eng­land last Sep­tem­ber for five Twen­ty20 In­ter­na­tion­als, they are with­out a sin­gle 50-over se­ries since No­vem­ber, 2019, large­ly due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic which wiped out near­ly all of their fix­tures.

Head coach Court­ney Walsh said in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion would com­ple­ment the prepa­ra­tion un­der­tak­en at last Jan­u­ary’s train­ing camp and the sec­ond one which gets un­der­way in An­tigua on Sun­day.

“We are still hope­ful of hav­ing a tour be­fore the Qual­i­fi­er, ei­ther some­one com­ing to the Caribbean or we go­ing to an­oth­er coun­try, but we are not sure what’s hap­pen­ing yet,” the West In­dies leg­end told re­porters.

“As soon as CWI can con­firm, we can firm up more plans be­cause noth­ing beats time in the mid­dle.

“In the in­ter­im, we are plan­ning to have more game sce­nar­ios and more prac­tice match­es than we did at the last camp, which was a lot more net train­ing.”

He con­tin­ued: “Un­for­tu­nate­ly, that is the best we can do. We are still hope­ful that be­fore the Qual­i­fi­er, we can al­so get the [do­mes­tic Women’s Cham­pi­onship] played, so we have a chance to see oth­er play­ers as well be­cause we need to widen the pool.”

West In­dies Women had been sched­uled to lock horns with South Africa Women last year in a five-match ODI se­ries but the tour of the Caribbean was scrapped due to the pan­dem­ic.

The Women’s Su­per50 Cup, the 50-overs do­mes­tic tour­na­ment, was al­so aban­doned along with the in­au­gur­al Un­der-19 girls Cham­pi­onship.

“Not be­ing able to play com­pet­i­tive match­es, it is hard to say if we have enough time to do every­thing we want. I have to un­der­stand the sit­u­a­tion and work with it the best way that I can,” Walsh con­tin­ued.

“In an ide­al world, if we were able to tour and play as much match­es as we could and get the (Women’s Su­per50) out of the way, I would say, yes, but it is a tick­lish sit­u­a­tion.

“It is some­thing that is un­der­stand­able, and we have to make the best of what we can and try to get in as much as we can.”

He added: “Once the play­ers are out there play­ing, I would much pre­fer that be­cause you have a bet­ter chance of judg­ing, as­sess­ing, see­ing who is in form, see­ing who is im­prov­ing or not.

“So that’s the biggest chal­lenge … not see­ing them on the in­ter­na­tion­al stage to use that to build up their con­fi­dence and to judge how they are per­form­ing.”

The last train­ing camp was staged last Jan­u­ary but play­ers have since been ham­pered in the amount of train­ing which could be done in their re­spec­tive ter­ri­to­ries, due to coro­n­avirus re­stric­tions which barred out­door train­ing.

Walsh said play­ers had still man­aged to main­tain a lev­el of fit­ness, how­ev­er, which could now be fur­ther en­hanced by the camp.

“All in all, a lot of work was done be­hind the scenes on the fit­ness lev­els of all the play­ers and they had drills to do, and the lo­cal coach­es and the lo­cal ter­ri­to­r­i­al boards have been very help­ful with get­ting some of that work done,” Walsh not­ed.

CMC