West Indies, West Indies, West Indies…

The tale of the “new” West Indies is not without drama… and I am not talking about the Gayle-vs-Board-vs-Senior Players-vs-Coach Otis Gibson saga.  I am talking about the latest tour of Bangladesh, the perfect opportunity to exact revenge for how Bangladesh embarrassed the Floyd Reifer-led West Indies hastily-put together C… er… B team last year during the dispute with the regular players.

Tour of Bangladesh

A team with promising players, and the great Marlon Samuels should be enough to win all series against Bangladesh… or so we thought.  The team has good bowlers and decent-enough batsmen.

So what  has happened

They have played one T-20 International (T20I) match against Bangladesh and 3 ODIs with only the tests remaining.

• Lost T20I “series” –  lost their only T20 to once lowly Bangladesh on the penultimate ball.
• The won ODI series – won first 2 matches convincingly but were skittled out for 61 runs in 3rd match, a true embarrassment, losing by 8 wickets.
• Marlon Samuels has been masterful, seeming to catch on to the shorter forms of the game quite well on his short return.  He became “Gayle of the West Indies” in the third match because, with Lendl Simmons out of the match, he failed for the first time in a long time, and everyone else failed… reminiscent of  yesteryear with Gayle’s where as he failed the entire team failed.

We hope for a better display from the batsmen, sort of redemption… This is kinda like the so-called “Redeem Team”  US Men’s Basketball team of superstars who went back to capture the trophy after losing multiple games in the prior tournament, one in which they were still using the name “Dream Team”.  Let’s face it that team was very good but there were only two US Basketball teams qualified to be called “Dream Team” and that were the first one with Jordan, Bird, Magic, etc. and the second one, but I have digressed too far.

This West Indies team is far far far away from the decades of the dream team with the likes of Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, etc. , and don’t expect to get back to those days.   Let’s get back to respectability, which starts with a solid board, good coaching, disciplined players, and good rapport between all parties.  Right now, we don’t have any of that 4 ingredients.  We do have good players, however, but we still need Shiv for Test matches and Gayle for all forms.