ST. JOHN'S, An­tigua

Joseph was side­lined for a lit­tle over a month fol­low­ing his re­turn home to An­tigua from the West In­dies Tour of Zim­bab­we to tend to his ail­ing moth­er.

He how­ev­er, re­turned to ac­tion for the Hur­ri­canes in the last two match­es of the 4-Day tour­na­ment be­fore the long break for the Christ­mas and New Year's hol­i­day, plus the Re­gion­al Su­per50 Tour­na­ment.

But the 20-year-old has not lit a spark, tak­ing just four wick­ets in the pe­ri­od, much to the dis­ap­point­ment of Ben­jamin, as the Hur­ri­canes suf­fered suc­ces­sive loss­es to the Wind­ward Is­lands Vol­ca­noes and Ja­maica Scor­pi­ons, slid­ing to fifth in the tour­na­ment.

"He is not com­ing and hit­ting the lines and lengths ef­fi­cient­ly, and we didn't want at the be­gin­ning of the sea­son, to be de­pend­ing on (Rah­keem Corn­wall) on­ly," Ben­jamin told the An­tigua Ob­serv­er news­pa­per.

"As you can see, Gavin Tonge and oth­er play­ers have stepped up, and with Alzarri com­ing back, we were sure that we would have an edge to our bowl­ing at­tack, but thus far it hasn't paid off."

Ben­jamin be­lieves the break will be good for not on­ly Joseph, but the rest of the Hur­ri­canes squad, giv­ing them a chance to re­group be­fore tack­ling the Su­per50 tour­na­ment and the re­main­der of the four-day match­es.

"Af­ter the Guyana game, Hugh Gore, our man­ag­er, and I had a meet­ing and based on our ob­ser­va­tions, one of the things we came up with is that some play­ers start­ed get­ting com­pla­cent," said Ben­jamin.

"So we saw it right at that point, and even in Trinidad, and in Wind­ward Is­lands. We ad­dressed it against Ja­maica, but (the break) comes at a very op­por­tune time be­cause we have to go back to the draw­ing board.

"We should be sec­ond on the ta­ble, but we had a game against the Vol­ca­noes, where we ba­si­cal­ly al­lowed that to get away from us, and I think that had a neg­a­tive ef­fect on us for the game against the Scor­pi­ons." (CMC)