Alvin?Corneal

Once again, the new­ly elect­ed West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) has made their first de­ci­sion in the new term, a po­si­tion which seemed to have been filled pre­vi­ous­ly with per­sons who have not quite im­proved the qual­i­ty of our game dur­ing their tenure.

When Ot­tis Gib­son was cho­sen, I felt that his ex­pe­ri­ence gained, when he was the bowl­ing coach for the Eng­land team, was def­i­nite­ly pre­ced­ed by coach­ing cours­es, which is the pre­req­ui­site for se­lec­tion in­to these po­si­tions.

Be­ing a fine fast bowler dur­ing his stint with the West In­dies as a play­er, I fig­ured that his abil­i­ty to per­form, plus his coach­ing ed­u­ca­tion may well be the recipe for suc­cess.

The dif­fi­cult as­sess­ment of coach men­tal­i­ty, com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, re­lay of tech­ni­cal in­for­ma­tion and cor­rec­tion of play­er er­rors, should have been test­ed be­fore the fi­nal choice was made. I be­lieve that Ot­tis failed in those de­part­ments.

How­ev­er, the choice of Curt­ly Am­brose to fill the gap, could have been done with­out much ev­i­dence, oth­er than the strength of his de­sire to achieve his goals and the strong mo­ti­va­tion­al ap­proach, some of which we were able to de­tect from his body lan­guage when he ad­dressed his play­ers pri­or to the start of a game.

Maybe we should learn to un­der­stand that the process to­wards the de­vel­op­ment of any sport does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean get­ting a good coach to work with our na­tion­al or in­ter­na­tion­al teams.

Ad­mit­ted­ly, the seat of­fered to Phil Sim­mons is one which is filled with many se­cret ar­eas of con­tent which may have us all say­ing in the near fu­ture that the for­mer West In­di­an open­ing bats­men is not get­ting the job done.

I be­lieve that Phil has the abil­i­ty to cure some of the ills among our play­ers in the same way that he had done to the Irish, whose lim­it­ed tal­ent his­to­ry in the game is a long way be­hind the West In­dies or any of the ma­jor coun­tries.

But my reser­va­tions lie with the men­tal­i­ty and in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ap­proach by West In­di­ans who seem not to re­spond to the cor­rec­tive mea­sures that would take their bat­ting, bowl­ing and field­ing to an­oth­er lev­el.

Bear this in mind, Phil's job is main­ly to guide the meth­ods of ap­proach of all the play­ers, whose nat­ur­al tal­ent, when per­formed in iso­la­tion, will find lit­tle suc­cess un­less the method­ol­o­gy can be brought to the game day per­for­mances.

Across the board, our crick­eters in this era lack the in­tel­li­gence that can make them bet­ter play­ers. They have al­ready formed their own opin­ions re­gard­ing the type of bat­ting, bowl­ing or even field­ing that they should adopt, de­spite the fact that Phil's in­put could well im­prove the qual­i­ty of their game.

I hon­est­ly be­lieve the present crop of se­lect­ed play­ers, ex­cept a few young ones like Kraigg Braith­wait­he, Jonathan Carter, John­son Charles, and Dar­ren Bra­vo with the bat­ting, and Ja­son Hold­er, Shan­non Gabriel, and a few oth­er fast bowlers, can­not go for­ward in the qual­i­ty of their per­for­mances.

These guys are too far ad­vanced in their short­com­ings in or­der to lis­ten to the sound ad­vice which Phil may bring to their tech­nique or even their tac­ti­cal ad­just­ment in their ef­fort to bring a bet­ter crick­et re­sult to their game.

This is not un­usu­al in the Caribbean. Our play­ers are not good lis­ten­ers to ad­vice and they pre­fer to get dis­missed in al­most the same way most times, or con­tin­ue to bowl de­liv­er­ies which im­ply no in­tend­ed strat­e­gy to dis­miss the op­po­si­tion.

The stan­dard of our crick­et needs to have the coach ed­u­ca­tors, whose train­ing meth­ods are based up­on teach­ing young­sters from as ear­ly as fif­teen years up­wards.

Many of to­day's po­ten­tial­ly good play­ers are of­ten de­vel­op­ing their game with­out mak­ing nec­es­sary cor­rec­tions to their ba­sic mis­takes.

The ex­pe­ri­enced coach­es who can break their skill in­to com­po­nents, cor­rect these de­fec­tive moves in­di­vid­u­al­ly, then put them to­geth­er again in or­der to nur­ture a tech­ni­cal­ly sound play­er, will pro­duce the su­per stars of to­mor­row.

Ob­vi­ous­ly the WICB per­son­nel does not un­der­stand the im­por­tance of bring­ing the best coach­es to the youth pro­grammes and plan for about five or six years to see the nat­ur­al tal­ent of the youth play­ers mush­room in­to the bet­ter twen­ty two year old, one with sol­id match prepa­ra­tions with bat and ball, in terms of plan­ning in­nings, bowl­ing me­thod­i­cal­ly, with good line and length, vari­a­tion of speed, spin, and di­rec­tion.

What I am say­ing is that Phil Sim­mons will do the best he can to the present play­ers, but they are far too ad­vanced in their old habits.

His main strength will be the mo­ti­va­tion which he had tak­en to Ire­land for many years and have turned medi­oc­rity in­to just bor­der­ing the fi­nal eight stage of world crick­et, but this all de­pends on the re­sponse which he gets from the present play­ers who all be­lieve that their pat­tern is al­ready work­ing for them.

I wish you luck Phil Sim­mons, but his­to­ry with our ath­letes have shown that they on­ly lend an ear to un­fa­mil­iar voic­es. Your task is a tough one, but some­how, I have the feel­ing that you may get much more out of them than your pre­de­ces­sors.

Like the Brazil­ian Sports coach­es favourite re­mark: "The fans on­ly ac­cept vic­to­ry. Any­thing else is fail­ure."