‘We’ve identified list of about hundred things’: Legends after meeting to revive West Indies cricket | Cricket News
Cricket West Indies organised an emergency meeting with cricket legends to discuss improvements needed in West Indies cricket.The meeting in Trinidad brought together cricket icons including Viv Richards, Brian Lara, Clive Lloyd, Desmond Haynes, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, and current head coach Daren Sammy.“We have identified a list of about a hundred things that we have to improve, but probably among the top five: facilities at every level for our cricketers; practice pitches across the region; the quality of our domestic tournaments. “There’s definitely a skills deficiency at various levels that don’t get highlighted till they reach international levels and then you see the glaring deficiencies vis-a-vis our international counterparts, which again is systemic,” said Chris Dehring, the CWI chief executive.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!The participants recognised West Indies cricket’s current position behind other cricket-playing nations and developed plans to revitalise the sport regionally.The group acknowledged that improvements would require significant time.“As the batting coach (Jimmy Adams) pointed out, it’s very difficult to change habits when you are getting somebody who has made so many runs at regional level but clearly has deficiencies when it comes to international level. It’s very difficult to change in a couple of weeks. There are issues concerning strength and conditioning, which again points back to facilities which are available to youngsters and emerging players and ‘A’ teams, etc,” Dehring explained.CWI intends to create a high-performance center to serve as a model for other regional countries.The meeting was called following West Indies’ recent poor performance against Australia, where they scored just 27 runs, recording the second-lowest innings total in Test history.“It’s been that case for years, where we are not in the same level-playing field as other playing countries. Back in the days when skill was the prominent factor, we excelled, we were the best team in the world. But the game has evolved, and technology and analytics, and we now have to see a new way of finding ourselves back to being very competitive. I said not a level-playing field because a lot of the countries are far ahead in these sorts of areas. The skill factor of the game is still there, but not as prominent as it was in the past,” Lara stated after the meeting.
