My last col­umn in­evitably cre­at­ed some de­bate amongst some of our crick­et fans as I re­ceived a few emails from sup­port­ers giv­ing me their opin­ion on what the Un­der-19 team should have done to win the quar­ter-fi­nal match against New Zealand. The most con­sis­tent view was that Jay­den Seales should have bowled in the last few overs against the Ki­wis.

Un­doubt­ed­ly the most in­ter­est­ing email was one which read, “COACH GRAEME WEST SHOULD BE FIRED” - a strong state­ment in­deed. The crick­et fan went on to sug­gest that he should shoul­der the blame while ques­tion­ing per­haps xeno­pho­bi­cal­ly, why a for­eign­er should be coach­ing our up and com­ing crick­eters in the first place.

Fi­nal­ly, he wrote about how Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) should stop ap­point­ing “nice boy” im­age cap­tains and in­stead opt for ag­gres­sive cap­tains in the fu­ture. While I agree with this last com­ment, it is un­for­tu­nate as St Lu­cian Ki­mani Melius may have shown all the right qual­i­ties of lead­er­ship dur­ing the last year and, to be frank, ag­gres­sive U-19 lead­ers can be dif­fi­cult to find.

At the U-19 lev­el, you have to have con­fi­dence in your abil­i­ty to lead. You must be able to make quick de­ci­sions based on how the game is go­ing; analysing the bats­men, as­sess­ing your bowlers and en­sur­ing one bowls them at the right time; mak­ing sure one has the right field­s­men in the cor­rect po­si­tions; mo­ti­vat­ing the team while on the field.

Most U-19 cap­tains are un­like­ly to have much ex­pe­ri­ence in terms of play­ing first-class crick­et. It is sel­dom easy to se­lect a cap­tain un­less the young­ster from ear­ly shows lead­er­ship qual­i­ties. Young Melius made an er­ror in his de­ci­sion as to who should bowl at the death but he will be stronger at the end of the tour­na­ment.

The com­ments about the coach to me are far more note­wor­thy than that of the cap­tain. The Windies sup­port­er felt that our fail­ure to win the U-19 World Cup is large­ly due to the fail­ure of the head coach. Ad­mit­ted­ly, I nev­er thought about this no­tion un­til I met a for­mer West In­dies play­er who ex­pressed the same opin­ion to me and it made me sit up and ques­tion: did we fail?

The easy an­swer is yes, we failed to win the U-19 World Cup but what was the man­date of the coach? It was to win the tour­na­ment rather than see us put up a good show­ing so I sup­pose CWI would not be hap­py with our fifth-place fin­ish. Are we a bet­ter team than our fifth place sug­gests? If so, then the coach has to take full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, raise his hand and say that we could and should have done bet­ter and failed to ex­e­cute prop­er­ly in cer­tain ar­eas.

When this new ad­min­is­tra­tion took of­fice, they open­ly said that our West In­di­an-born coach­es would have the first call on be­ing se­lect­ed to coach the re­spec­tive re­gion­al teams. While this is true with both the men's and women's teams, fans ques­tioned the ap­point­ment of West for the U-19 team, es­pe­cial­ly as it is the young­sters we are speak­ing about. I have not seen the cre­den­tials of Mr West but I ex­pect that they are up to scratch. How­ev­er, if CWI is true to their word, then how did the name of Graeme West fea­ture be­fore some of our coach­es? Is it that our coach­es are not qual­i­fied enough? Is it a ques­tion of ex­pe­ri­ence? Or is it West be­ing the in­cum­bent that he was sim­ply re­tained?

In our se­nior men's team, the bat­ting coach and the team an­a­lyst are two for­eign­ers ap­point­ed by coach Phil Sim­mons and skip­per Kieron Pol­lard to work with the squad. I have no prob­lem with those ap­point­ments sim­ply be­cause Sim­mons and Pol­lard re­quest­ed them as all coach­es feel most com­fort­able work­ing with cer­tain in­di­vid­u­als who they be­lieve will do the job best. It is time CWI looks at our own to coach the younger teams as we want them to play with the West In­di­an flair but be dis­ci­plined in do­ing so.

Un­sur­pris­ing­ly, Seales and Ny­eem Young made the U-19 all-star team and I re­main con­fi­dent that agents will be hound­ing them down for their sig­na­tures. I just hope they seek the right ad­vice as they are two play­ers des­tined for a great fu­ture.

I thought Ash­mead Nedd might have forced his way in­to the All-Star XI based on his fine bowl­ing dur­ing the tour­na­ment but the se­lec­tors seem to have gone on per­for­mance rather than a bal­anced team as they se­lect­ed three leg break and goo­gly bowlers in Shafiqul­lah Gha­fari from Bangladesh and the In­di­an pair of Yashasvi Jaisw­al and Ravi Bish­noi.

Per­haps most im­por­tant­ly, have you no­ticed that the top three teams in the tour­na­ment all came from the In­di­an sub­con­ti­nent? It may be that these na­tions - Bangladesh, In­dia, and Pak­istan - are plac­ing more em­pha­sis on get­ting young­sters in­volved in the game of crick­et than the oth­er na­tions.

CWI must in­sist that the re­spec­tive boards take a deep­er in­ter­est in their de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes from U-10 lev­el or these teams will dom­i­nate for many years to come. We have two years to plan for the next ICC U-19 World Cup which will be on home soil - an added im­pe­tus to not let it slip.

Ed­i­tor's note

The views ex­pressed in this col­umn are sole­ly those of the writer and do not re­flect the views of any or­gan­i­sa­tion of which he is a stake­hold­er.