Former West Indies batting coach, Toby Radford, has suggested calls to replace all-rounder Jason Holder are an overreaction and said he would stick with the current captain, despite the success of Kraigg Brathwaite in Bangladesh.
Brathwaite was widely commended for his role in leading an understrength team to a 2-0 win away to Bangladesh earlier this month. Holder, on the other hand, was one of 12 players to pull out of the tour after citing health and safety concerns.
Holder had, however, also pointed to feeling some level of fatigue having had to deal with quarantine situations in both the West Indies prior tours of England and New Zealand. However, in addition, aspects of the team’s performance on those tours had also put Holder and his captaincy under the microscope.
While admitting that the team had performed exceptionally well in Bangladesh, Radford, however, saw no reason to replace Holder as the man in charge for the upcoming Sri Lanka series.
“I think they surprised everybody not least of all Bangladesh, probably their own supporters as well. They performed really well. But it’s very easy to get carried away, isn’t it? You have a couple of big wins like that and then suddenly we have done it because Kraigg Brathwaite is captain and Jason Holder wasn’t captain,” Radford told the Mason and Guest radio program.
“Who’s to know if Jason was captain whether you would have had the two wins anyway,” he added.
“There were a lot of very good individual performances and because individuals play well and you win two matches, to me, that isn’t down to captaincy.”
In supporting his decision to stick with Holder, Radford pointed to the example of the incident with India captain Virat Kolhi, which occurred during the Asian team’s big win over Australia.
“It was raised the other day, someone mentioned Virat Kohli. They (India) lost the game in Australia, he went home for the birth of his child. They went suddenly and won a couple of games. When they started the Test series against England, in India, nobody questioned whether Kohli should captain the team. He came back in because he was captain.” (SportsMax)
