West Indies cricket has its priorities wrong

Bat and ball / Ralph Ellis / 20 October 2011 / Leave a Comment

Lendl Simmons has shown he has great potential but how much Test cricket will he play during his career?

"Tuesday’s performance was all the more miserable because Windies were 33 for just one wicket, before they fell to bits. If ever there was a sign of a team that might struggle in the longer form of the game, that must have been it."

The West Indies Test team has been in a slump for a while now with fans preferring the limited-overs format and an IPL contract being the ultimate goal for the young players. Test Cricket needs the Windies to re-think their priorities, says Ralph Ellis.

As a small boy I went on a school trip to Lord's to watch England play the West Indies. It was in the days when you could sit on the grass behind the boundary rope, and me and my mate Pete were heroes of the other kids because we fielded a couple of balls after they had gone for four.

It was in 1969 and the great Sir Gary Sobers was Windies captain. But what I remember best and still vividly, was the mesmerising innings played by a gangling and bespectacled young left-hander called Clive Lloyd, who went on a whirlwind innings after tea smashing fours and sixes to all parts of the ground. There was a romance about the dash and adventure of a carefree team, and Lloyd encapsulated everything that was great about the era of brilliant Caribbean cricketers which was about to unfold.

I thought of that the other morning when I was listening to my fellow but far more distinguished Betfair columnist Michael Vaughan, bemoaning the current state of West Indies cricket. If you didn't notice, they were shot out on Tuesday for just 61 by Bangladesh in the last of a One Day series. At a time when Australia are rebuilding, and India are playing so much cricket that you worry the former world number one Test nation might burn out, the world game desperately needs a revival in the Caribbean. But I'm not sure if there's too much sign of that happening.

Vaughan was making the point that the rewards on offer for successful one-day players could well damage the five-day version, and especially in the West Indies, where the big money goes to anybody who can land themselves an IPL contract. The Test team play for comparative peanuts, so all the incentive is to develop outrageous instant scoring strokes, rather than learn to build an innings. Eventually that must have an effect, and you just wonder if it could be sooner rather than later. West Indies start a two-match Test series against Bangladesh on the same Chittagong wicket tomorrow. You suspect they have been made favourites on reputation rather than current form,making a price of [2.06] one to lay.

Tuesday's performance was all the more miserable because Windies were 33 for just one wicket, before they fell to bits. If ever there was a sign of a team that might struggle in the longer form of the game, that must have been it. There's no doubt they still produce talent. Lendl Simmons hit his maiden century in the first game of the ODI series, and followed it with 80 off 125 balls in the second. He's been brought into the Test squad in place of injured Adrian Barath as his reward.

But on a wicket in Chittagong which is notorious for starting out as a batsman's paradise but then turning into a minefield, this could turn out to be anything but a routine West Indies win. I know that Clive Lloyd golden era was a very long time ago, but I fear that Vaughan is right and we may never see anything to remotely resemble it again.

Five things you might not know about Lendl Simmons

1.Born January 1985 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, his full name is Lendl Mark Platter Simmons

2.His uncle is West Indies all-rounder Phil Simmons, who played 26 Tests and 143 One Day Internationals - and is now head coach of Ireland

3He made his first class debut six weeks after his 17th birthday, and was a key figure for the Windies in the Under19 World Cups in both 2002 and 2004.

4.He was at the centre of a bitter row between the West Indies Players' Association and their cricket board last year when after being dropped from the side, he didn't get his central contract money paid in full.

5.He was part of the Trinididad and Tobago side that shared a million dollar prize fund for winning the ill-fated Stamford Twenty20 series - scoring 26 not out in a nine wicket win against Jamaica, meaning his share worked out at roughly $2,500 a run!