Dear Editor,
It pained me to see the West Indies team’s performance in the recent series in New Zealand, and the present one day series in Bangladesh. It is so poor that until something drastic is done to improve our cricket, I would like to recommend that we stop playing one day and test cricket and play only T20 cricket.
There are so many areas that we are deficient in but I will only focus on the catching and batting. When you can’t bat and put big scores on the board, at least hold your catches. In New Zealand we dropped about twenty catches and we gave one batsman alone, five chances. For heaven’s sake, hold your catches, and this is an indictment on the coaching staff. As for the batting, there are so many technical flaws in our batsmen that they should not be playing international cricket.
When you look at our batsmen many of them do not know where their off stump is and would play at balls that they should have left alone, the result most times they are caught in the slips or by the keeper when they are facing high quality fast bowling. Also, many of them cannot handle short pitched bowling. When it comes to spin bowling, many of them are hopeless.
As I said, batting and catching are our biggest problems, and until we can find another Lara or Chanderpaul, we should not be playing one day and test cricket. WI should embark on more ‘A’ team tours to bring our batsmen up to international standard. I hope Rickey Skerritt and his band of merrymen will heed my plea.
Yours faithfully,
Imtiaz Baccus
