By Kimberley Cummins
Just five years ago Barbados and West Indies allrounder Roston Chase was a highly regarded middle order batsman and an extremely handy off-spinner. He was a certainty on the West Indies side and early in his career was named Cricketer-of-the-Year and Test-Cricketer-of-the-Year by the West Indies Players’ Association.
Chase’s test debut for the regional team was in the 2016 home series against a strong India side. In the second game at Sabina Park in Jamaica, he scored an impressive 137 not out and was awarded Player of the Match. Things were looking good for the 30-year-old who, over the proceeding years, would knock off four more centuries and three shy of a dozen half centuries. He complemented this with 104 wickets across the three formats.
However, in a few short years the runs have all but dried up, with some critics claiming that Chase can’t buy a run far less make one. He now averages a paltry 26 in Tests and worse at 24 in one-day internationals (ODI), and has been dropped from the West Indies team across formats.
What has gone wrong with Chase go and can he bounce back from this abysmal slump?
Former Barbados and England cricketer, Roland Butcher, believes Chase can. In fact, in an interview with Barbados TODAY, while maintaining that recessionary periods for sports people are part and parcel of the profession, Butcher said that he believes the catalyst for Chase’s comeback will be his ability to reinvent himself.
“He needs to keep fighting. He is probably feeling that it is only him, but he must take comfort that many people have travelled that road and come out the other end, so he has got to be optimistic. In sports there is no guarantee of success. He has got to reinvent himself and come again and accept that what is happening to him is part of being a professional sportsman and he’s got to work hard and prepare himself so that the next time around he can make good use of it. He has fallen from great heights but he is not the first one. Kirk Edwards is another example who fell from being West Indies vice-captain to, within a few years now, no team wants him anymore,” Butcher said.
The other area, Butcher thinks would serve Chase well is for him to decide what role he wants to play in the game, be it “a batsman who can bowl a bit or a bowler who can bat a bit” and not let people back him into a corner. The cricket administrator contended that Chase cannot “be all things to all people” and to recover from this dry spell he has no choice but to make this decision and work diligently at it if at 30 he wants to extend his career.
“He is going to have to concentrate on one of those and be the best at what he can be at what he chooses. With the problems that we have in West Indies generally with our batting, that would be a good area for him to concentrate on getting that right because opportunities for batsmen will become available. As you know, we don’t have any superstar batsmen,” he added.
Using England player Keaton Jennings as an example of a cricketer that was able to reinvent himself, Butcher noted that Jennings had not played for his national side for some three years but he was able to use the period he was dropped to work on his craft and himself, this included reading for a degree. Now Jennings is on the verge of being selected for England again.
The ability of players to balance cricket and a “release” be it academic or another form is a critical focus Butcher believes is lacking in West Indies cricket.
The retired head coach of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Academy of Sport, stressed this was one of the objectives of the programme when he was at the helm. That is, helping people to balance sport and academics and use each discipline to help the other one. Butcher underscored its success as exemplified through graduates including Rommel Currency, Miles Bascombe, Liam Sebastian, Chadwick Walton, Kyle Corbin and Kavesh Kantasingh.
Insisting this release doesn’t necessarily have to be academic, Butcher stated it was more about finding another interest outside of the sport. As seen in Tino Best who while playing cricket was training to be a personal trainer or Ricardo Elcock, who during his cricketing years was training to be a pilot and went on to become Virgin Atlantic’s first black pilot.
“I’m not sure how many of our guys in the Caribbean, besides playing, have any other interests and I believe that is something they should do, get involved in other things to assist them with their game.
“It brings your life into focus. If you are only concentrating on cricket then you think that cricket is the be-all and end-all . . . and especially when things are not going well, the last thing you want is to be constantly being reminded about that. These guys need to have other pursuits so they are doing it alongside the cricket and it brings it into reality. So, my advice to someone like Chase, right now all he would be interested in is wanting to get back into the West Indies team but that’s not all to life. Too many of our guys don’t do anything else and we need to change that,” Butcher told Barbados TODAY. (KC)
