No interest yet from CWI, BCA on new bats

By Kimberley Cummins

West Indies cricket is losing out on new specially designed training bats that could possibly turn around its losing slide.

So said former England test player, Barbados-born Roland Butcher who revealed to Barbados TODAY that since the launch of the bats at Lord’s Cricket Ground this past June, he has had conversations with officials from several international playing sides but he has not been approached by Cricket West Indies (CWI) nor the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA). However, CWI vice-president Dr Kishore Shallow has spoken to Butcher about the bats on behalf of the Windward Islands Cricket Board.

Butcher’s bats are designed for batters who face problems with swing and seam or have weaknesses against spin bowling. Throughout his professional career, Butcher, a right-handed batsman, found it tough to deal with the ball that comes back into the batsman. So, after his retirement, he came upon the idea to design a bat which could help correct that particular technical weakness, alongside tackling off-spin. In 2002, Butcher registered his three-bat inventions with the International Cricket Council (ICC) and they were then sent to Loughborough University for testing. The scientific study and testing were conducted by the Wolfson School of mechanical, electrical and manufacturing engineering at the same university. The process took a couple of years to complete and in 2004, Butcher was handed a complete and comprehensive thesis.

“Sports has moved on from the time I was a boy. When I was a boy growing up in St. Philip, what the hell did I know about sports science or nutrition or technology? Absolutely nothing, you just played the sport and that was it. . . . It is different now and the first thing we have to get our people to understand is that there is a different requirement these days for a professional sportsman. What is required to take them to the next level and it is not just all technical (bat and ball). The real point is how do you build an athlete that in the heat of the battle will remain composed, calm and perform? We’ve got a real task,” he lamented.

“Am I confident whether we will do that, I am not sure because for three years I tried to give the region technology, not guesswork, proven technology and it is not as if we were performing well. We weren’t! We have been performing poorly and the critics and supporters talk about it every single day – our batting, our batting, our batting. So, it could not have been anything worse. For three years I offered this technology because I am a West Indian, a Barbadian. And Barbados [cricket] they are no better because they have been offered this technology first and foremost and have done nothing – have not embraced it in any way. They are more culpable than anybody else. So, our cricket has been in a state, here is a Barbadian and a West Indian, offering a proven product to assist them and no interest whatsoever. So, am I surprised why we continue to do what we do? Of course not! Because if you continue to do what you’ve always done, you will get the results you have always got. Plain and simple,” Butcher stressed.

The retired head coach of the Sports Academy at the University of the West Indies said that the regional side has to get past the belief that talent is all that is needed. He noted that talented players come “ten a penny” and if West Indies cricket does not embrace all the technology available it will just be changing players because “they are not good enough”.

“Even the lesser nations are going past us because they recognise it is not only talent these days. There is a whole science behind being a cricketer, being a bowler, batsman, athlete. There is a science that in the region we don’t fully embrace because we do not understand that there is a science to sport and it is not just making sport. People build athletes, they don’t just happen. I think we are still in the phase of expecting a genius to come along. The rest of the world is building athletes in terms of their physiques, techniques, and nutrition, all of these things go into building an athlete, whatever sport it is. We must understand and we must acknowledge, I am not too sure whether we fully understand or acknowledge, that is the case. That is my take on it. And We will continue to hark back to when we were world champions at Test cricket, 50-over cricket and T20,” Butcher said.