Defending champions, the West Indian team, looks very muddled up this time and they have plenty of issues to solve before they go-ahead to play their next games this year. In other words, the Caribbeans are far from being the top favorite for the upcoming tournaments, contrary to what West Indies skipper Pollard believes.
In the past, West Indies had been one of the most sought-after and attractive cricketing teams. Their excellent games the last time helped them to gain a lot of fans, which was seen in the 2016 T20 finals. However, their larger than life aura was not able to stop the country from going downhill, and all of these occurred due to the financial issues and constant tussles going on with the board. This has hugely hampered the legacy of the team.
After the win in 2016, they have become quite inconsistent and the West Indies team has started struggling a lot. Even though Pollard said that they are one of the top favorites for the upcoming T20 world cup, things look quite different among the cricket fans. This is true even after the return of big cricketing stars like Chris Gayle and Andrew Russell, who became available after a long term of absence. It was due to their preference for playing for the league team over the Windies.
West Indies chief selector Desmond Haynes thinks that team has good composition for upcoming showpiece event in Australia. The Caribbean team didn’t have good run at 2021 world cup but they’ll be up for 2022 challenge.
“We’re always going to have talent in the West Indies, we are just a little unfortunate that we don’t have the numbers. We can’t really compare to places like Australia and India because they’ve got loads of players playing cricket, with the various academies around those countries,” he said in an interview to Betway.
West Indies was the only team to win two T20 world cups, but their performance degraded in the last five years. They are currently ranked at No. 10 in the ICC T20 team rankings below Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Previously the absence of their star players was thought to be the main reason, but they delivered poor performance even after the full squad was present in their last match with South Africa.
Since their win in the T20 world cup, the Caribbeans have won only 20 matches out of 58 T20s, which gives them a win/loss ratio of 0.588- it is the worst performance even among sides including countries like Ireland, Netherland, etc.
The country has produced some of the top T20 players with a lot of experience but expecting them to perform the best and get adapted with the younger generation immediately might not seem to be a good idea. There are several issues in the team that need to be addressed first. The batsmen in the team are not contributing enough runs to the game. Also, they are unable to tackle the spinners, which is a huge downside. The team also lacks good spinners which also contributes to the downgrading of their game quality.
Apart from solving these issues, the team also needs to focus on solving their internal disputes so that the players and members can work together. It is also important that the financial issues are addressed before they head towards the next game. The team also needs to recruit better players, so that they can strengthen their batting and bowling sides.
