Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.
by Rollins Howard
For quite an extended period of time we (loyal West Indies fans) have endured one series defeat after another, especially in One Day Internationals (ODIs) and T20 Internationals (T20Is), but we have stoically kept the faith with our team. We have become accustomed to the ridiculous comments after each thrashing. As the ole Bajan saying goes ‘we have proved through’ offerings from the various captains such as “We must go back to the drawing board” or “despite the overall result we will still take away several positives from the series” and one of my favourites “we are a team in transition and are rebuilding”.
We have learnt to accept these inconveniences and continue to hope that the day will soon come when we decide to begin playing our cricket on the field once again rather than in the pavilion or through the microphone.
It was therefore somewhat of a shock, almost a physical shock, when I heard the comments of our Head Coach, Phil Simmons, on the just concluded series against India. Despite showing some fight in the ODI series we were soundly beaten and did a re-enactment in the T20I series. One of Mr Simmons’ reasons for our continued poor performances is “We need to stop losing wickets, and once we stop losing wickets we’re going to make big scores”.
This is one of the most inane excuses that I have ever heard for losing a cricket match. To be quite honest it is indeed a very true statement, but it is also equally true that if our bowlers take three hat-tricks in the opening overs of a match we should easily win the game. In both instances the role of the opposition is to see that neither of these two scenarios comes to pass and by the same token it is also the role of our team to try as much as possible to make them a reality.
Mr Simmons’ comments are to me the equivalent of a football coach saying that his team would have won the match if it had scored more goals than its opponents – a perfectly true statement but just as stupid as it is true.
It is high time that we stop talking nonsense at the end of every series and get back to doing the basics, and doing them right. The basics of the game have not changed but we are now seemingly more enthused and concerned with the peripherals of the game than with implementing the basics during the actual game, and this I believe has been our downfall. Cricket is still played on the field and whilst it is useful to discuss tactics and strategy in the pavilion if we cannot implement them on the field of play we will be forever ‘spinning top in mud’.
