The Jamaican cricket team has been dominating West Indies regional cricket for the past 5 years and seem likely to continue the dominance this year, as they have easily dispatched the Leeward and Windward Islands and currently have the Guyanese team staring certain defeat in the 2010 Four Day Regional Competition. However there are serious flaws in the makeup of the Jamaican team and it is obvious that the Panel of Selectors are aware of them and are actually support these shortcoming.
Looking at the XI that face the Islands over the past 2 week, the Jamaican team seem to be unbalanced, with a bowler short and playing the extra batsman, when you have an all-rounder in David Bernard Jr. opening the bowling with either Darren Powell or Andrew Richardson, you know something is wrong. It is obvi
ous the Selectors have reasoned that our strength lie in our spin bowling duo of Nikita Miller and Odean Brown who have, over the past 2-3 years run riot over all and sundry to the extent that Captain Tamar Lambert seem to use his pacers to get the shine off the ball quickly before turning to spin, and it has worked, so the Selectors are probably saying to themselves “Why mess with Success?”
Continued dominance in cricket depends a lot on the reserve players that we have waiting in the wings, and the amount of opportunities given to them to learn how to cope at the higher level. Stacking the team with batsmen and depending on 2 bowlers and an all-rounder to consistently bowl out the opposition can backfire if there no real bowlers to back them up, what happens if both spinners are unable to break a partnership ? Instead of playing Darren Powell who seems incapable to getting wickets at this level, and has next to no chance of getting back into the West Indies test team, we should be blooding young pacers like Jason Dawes, Krishmar Santokie, Andre Russell and Ricardo Dacres and giving them an opportunity to learn at a higher level.
The quartet of Xavier Marshall, Brenton Parchment, Shaun Findlay and Danza Hyatt have all failed to give Jamaica reasonable starts at top of the order and we have had to depend on Lambert, Nash, Hinds and Baugh to set us good scores, what happens in the one or two matches that Hinds and Baugh fail with Nash away on West Indies duty in Australia ? A perfect opportunity exist for Mr. Perry and company to blood one of or both batsmen Zeniffe Fowler and Horace Miller and achieve two tasks, one - to expose two new players with enormous potential and two - to drop from the system chronic under-performers who have been given more than enough opportunities to show that they belong.
The Trindadians, Windwards, Leewards and Guyanese have all been “blooding” youngsters, while the Jamaican team has correctly allowed players time to settle in and perform, but methinks that Messrs. Marshall, Hyatt, Parchment, Findlay and Darren Powell have had more than enough opportunities to prove that they belong, and unfortunately the verdict is NO - THE DO NOT BELONG !
The Selectors seem to be playing it safe because we are currently winning, but if they wait until we start losing to get new players into the team, we will be running the risk of taking two steps backward before taking one step forward again, and erasing the advances that have been made in our local cricket programme.
Copyright to their respective holders
No comments:
Post a Comment