cricket_22001 wrote:In the last couple of years New Zealand & Bangladesh have made improvements to pitches for batting. This is borne out in their first class stats. In about 90 years of Plunket Shield it was the finest,generally, to have batting averages over 40. These include Crowe, Sutcliffe, Reid, Scott, Dowling, Turner. Now, their top 5 run getters are Sinclair, Papps, Fulton, Cumming, Harris & Bell. All internationals but not regulars & average over 40 in Plunket Shield. There are others.And the international performances have improved also.
In the first few years of Bangladesh's National Cricket League rarely anyone averaged 40 plus. In the last couple of years, ex international players Shahriar Nafees, Tushar Imran, Shuvogoto Hom & Rajin Saleh have lifted their average above 40. Current internationals Tamim Iqbal, Anamul Haque, Liton Das & Naeem Iqbal all average over 40 (some 50). Plus there has been an increase in double hundreds, with Mossadek Hossain leading the way.
So, where does leave the Windies?
With the need to improve the pitches for batting clearly. That's long been a talking point in the West Indies. And this year the board stated it would actually look into it for the Professional Cricket League.
The Windies are now almost regarded as a good will tour by the major countries. And those tours take place in the middle of the year (England excepted). But their domestic season is played November-February/March. So when the Windies host, no cricket is current for anybody except incumbents to have a reasonable opportunity to stake a claim for honors. (Maybe they go into camp!).
So maybe Windies have to bite the bullet & reschedule their domestic season.
Umm....how?
June to November is the hurricane/rainy season in the West Indies. It also gets incredibly hot from June to October. November to March is a much cooler time of the year and the weather is far better. April and May are also not
that hot but you do get rains during that time as well, but not as much as in the official hurricane season (certainly not as much as in say September or October).
At best, if you want to get weather in which you can be fairly certain of playing out a full four days of cricket then the best months are November to April (maybe May).
Outside of the official first-class season, shorter forms of cricket are played (List A (with the tournament often being in October but now recently more in December/January), 50-over cricket below the List A level and 2-day, and 3-day cricket below the first-class level in the various territories - e.g. Guyana and Barbados do 3-day cricket (3 consecutive days); Trinidad does 2-day and 3-day cricket with the matches being scheduled for Saturday, Sunday and the following Saturday or for a Sunday and the following Saturday and Sunday); Jamaica does 2-day cricket, the Windwards do 2-day cricket and the Leewards do 3-day cricket).
Rather than reschedule their domestic season, there are other options available. Rescheduling the domestic season to fit the international season seems a bit odd really. Which other countries have ever fully rescheduled their domestic season?
Instead I think the West Indies should:
1. continue with the professional first class league. This is important because while other countries instituted professional first-class cricket years ago, the West Indies only really did so last season. Prior to that players were just paid per match and depending on the season they might have played anywhere between 5 to 12 matches. After the season was done, that was it. They would then go back to their regular lives (and jobs in many instances) and play cricket below the first-class level. Within a professional set up they would be paid year round to focus on their cricket and also keep regular contact with their franchise.
2. continue with the double round robin format. Incredibly for many, many seasons the first-class format was single round robin. With 6 teams (sometimes 7) you then only had a 5 matches per team at a minimum. With semi-finals and a final it would mean a couple teams played 7 matches, but the majority of the players would only play (at BEST) 5 matches per season. This is far, far too low. If you check the thread I have on the WI domestic season you can see where last season the performances of the teams improved noticeably by rounds 7-10 of the double round robin season. If there were only 5 rounds this improvement woudl never have happened. With double round robin, then every team plays at least 10 matches for the season now.
3. Improve the pitches for batting. This will build batsmen's confidence and experience as well as make the bowlers have to work harder for their wickets (and thus improve the bowling). The pitch has to be done right so it doesn't become too easy for batting of course, but they need to be better for batting than they currently are.
4. Encourage the territories to professionalize their own multi-day cricket and where possible to lengthen the matches played and to concentrate the player pool. For example, in Trinidad they could encourage that the traditional North v South fixture become basically the premier multi-day cricket series below the first-class level (the last time it was played on a multi-day basis (over 4 days in fact) was in December 2009), perhaps with 2 matches of 3 consecutive days and a final match of 4 consecutive days and with the best players from the 2-day and 3-day competitions being picked for the North and South sides. With the Leeward Islands it could be encouraged to (a) regularly play non-first class multi-day cricket (in recent times the Leewards tournament wasn't even held in a couple of seasons) and (b) encourage all the Leeward Islands to play their own 2-day cricket at least (currently only Antigua I believe and maybe Nevis play any multi-day cricket outside of the Leewards tournament). With the Windwards they could encourage the introduction of a North Windwards v South Windwards tournament consisting like the proposed format for Trinidad of 2 matches of 3 consecutive days and a final match of 4 consecutive days. In Jamaica they could encourage the reintroduction of the semi-pro league that had once been established. The problem in Jamaica would seem to be that with over 20 teams playing in their 2-day league they have issues with the best playing against best. Instead the league is divided up into geographical conferences (to save on money obviously) but this will mean that the strong teams from one area will not face the strong teams from another area. If they were able to reintroduce the semi-pro league (which had I believe the best 8-10 teams from across the island playing against each other and included promotion and relegation) but perhaps divide that higher level competition into geographical conferences to save money (and have matches played over 3 days - Saturday, Sunday and the next Saturday) then the performance of the Jamaican team in first-class cricket might improve. The same would hold true for Trinidad by the way (which has about 18 teams if I remember correctly competing in geographical based leagues for their 3-day championship/premiership) as one can note that in recent times the two most populous territories (Jamaica and T&T) have been middling teams. For Guyana they could encourage the local board to return some form of the current competition (3 counties playing 4 day cricket against each other) even after a new 8-team competition is introduced. For Barbados there wouldn't seem to be much need for any improvements (as both they and Guyana have been doing well in the first-class competition in recent times), though perhaps introducing a 3 team 4-day competition for the best of the best from the regular season). These encouraged improvements would be in addition to the usual trial matches that each territory has ahead of the first-class season.
5. Have more regular A-team matches and tours. Especially in the April to October period.
Also, even though the top 20-25 players aren't playing domestically, there appears to be an overall improvement in batting performances domestically this season. So have pitches improved?
Possibly. I suspect though it is more due to the fact that many of these players are now in a professional set up for the first time in a West Indies domestic competition.
Spinners feature prominantly in the averages. Now this might ruffle feathers but surely the Windies should play to their strength & embrace the spinners, especially at home. They have done it before in the 50s with Ramadhin & Valentine & no fast bowler of note. Just a thought.
Indeed and agreed. With the spinners though WI need to be cautious because Shillingford and Narine have demonstrated that some of the best spinners may indeed be the best pelters rather than the best spinners.
They just have too many inconsistent performers right now. Samuels looks bored, Ramdin & Taylor need to lift & support Holder. The right players is one thing, the right attitude is another thing.
Quite. That's been a perennial complaint from WI fans - even if you aren't a consistent or good performer
right now, at least you should have the right attitude 99% of the time, which for whatever reasons a lot of WI players don't. Not even for their domestic teams (contrary to misinformed and popular belief). Folks sometimes think that maybe the players would perform better if they were playing for their territorial teams internationally instead of WI, but what happens at the WI level happens at the territorial level but it just gets reported less because domestic cricket isn't followed as widely around the world as international cricket. So at the WI level you have frequent strikes concerning tours. Guess what? Same thing happens at the domestic level, most notably when Trinidad qualified for the Champions League a few times (with a near strike one time as the players were, as usual, demanding more money from the Trinidad board ahead of the Champions League). This first-class season there was some disquiet and dispute concerning a few Trinidad players who went off to play in the Bangladesh T20 league during the first-class season. The players were incensed that the TTCB claimed that this move of theirs violated the terms of their contract and that as a result they would not be paid as per their franchise contract but would be selected and paid on a per-match basis upon their return. The players (as usual) made noises about retaining legal services over this dispute. And in the last first-class season we saw Dwayne Bravo and Pollard withdraw from the T&T first-class squad (in Bravo's case without so much as even playing a single match)
after being selected and then declaring they were unavailable (basically retiring) for first-class cricket (Bravo) or taking an "indefinite break" from first-class cricket (Pollard). That kind of behaviour was just shoddy and unprofessional and would have been frowned upon by the administration in most other countries (Kevin Pietersen can tell them all about that when it comes to the ECB).
It has long been noted that the attitude of many of the current WI players improves markedly with the greater amounts of money being paid over to them. They play with a much better attitude in the IPL and other overseas leagues (though Gayle's attitude at Sydney Thunder, where he continued a lavish lifestyle off the pitch while only averaging 19 on the pitch and not having much runs in total for the season, was noted with widespread disapproval in Sydney overall....this season for the Big Bash League he is due to appear for Melbourne instead of Sydney Thunder which given what happened last season may not be surprising) and they played much, much better when the old Stanford league and Stanford's million-dollar match were being held.
The problem with that kind of financially dependent attitude is that there is simply NO WAY that the West Indies (much less the individual territories) can match the kind of money on offer from places like India, Bangladesh, England and Australia. With 6 million people in the West Indies (the majority being poor or middle income) it means you can't charge the same amount for a T20 match or a first-class match as you would in England or Australia or even India and it means you will never get the numbers of fans necessary to make up for low incomes (as you would in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka and in a way in India or South Africa) to produce the kind of gate receipts necessary to pay relatively huge, huge sums over to the players. In fact, the recent debacle in India was in part due to players like Bravo, Pollard, Ramdin and Sammy being upset that money which was originally paid to the senior players
in lieu of central contracts had now been renegotiated by the WICB and WIPA to be paid towards the professional cricket league and giving the 90+ domestic players a year-round salary instead. In most other countries this would be seen as reasonable since the senior players now have central contracts (so paying sponsorship money in lieu of central contracts would seem redundant) and can get bonuses for performance. But the senior players didn't like the idea that the money they were used to getting was going to be possibly reduced in any way, shape or form (despite this being negotiated by their own union) and thus had their hissy fit moment over it.
It is interesting to note that most of these "mercenary" West Indians (as some fans have called them) seem to have little interest in playing T20 domestic cricket in New Zealand (at least this last season I don't remember any West Indians playing for any of the Kiwi domestic teams). This might well be because the amount of money that is on offer in NZ isn't high enough, which in turn might be related to the fact that NZ has a small population (around 5-6 million like the WI) and thus gate receipts and other sponsorship money would be lower than across the Tasman Straits in Australia. New Zealand is richer than the West Indies, so more can be charged per patron to attend the matches, but even this might not be enough it would seem to produce the kind of remuneration package that would make Gayle, Dwayne Bravo, Pollard, Dwayne Smith or Darren Sammy catch a plane to Wellington.
What is most disappointing with this attitude though is that in the West Indies, as per agreement between the various countries, West Indian cricketers (and I believe domestic cricketers) do not pay income tax since the various countries have agreed not to tax persons working in or participating in regional integration initiatives (so CARICOM employees are not supposed to pay income tax either I believe). As a result, WI players are actually not the worst paid players internationally but among the best paid (if I remember correctly, I once saw someone check the figures and WI players were (at the time) possibly the fourth best paid players based on their central contracts and tax-free incomes).
Perhaps in time new players with better attitudes (like Kraigg Brathwaite, Jason Holder, Jermaine Blackwood and Andre Russell) will come up through the system and gradually replace those still around with poor attitudes. But it won't happen overnight.