One step forward but four backward, that would now seem to be the lament of West Indies cricket fans following the recent T20I choices made by the Selection channel both before and during the current home series against the touring England. Just six months before the Caribbean is scheduled to joint host the ICC 2024 T20 World Cup along with the USA, common sense would suggest that the West Indies Selectors should be seeking to build a squad capable of winning that tournament for an unprecedented third time.
Common sense often proves to be anything but prevalent though, especially with West Indies cricket. So perhaps it should not have come as much of a surprise to anyone that the West Indies Selectors in their infinite wisdom, or lack thereof, chose at the beginning of the England series to recall to the squad the now 35 almost 36-year-old Andre Russell whose best days as a T20 all-rounder are now well in the past. They also chose to include Kyle Mayers, the tried, tested, and proven international failure as one of only two opening batters in the squad, Brandon King being the other. as well as the equally undeserving thirty-one-year-old Roston Chase as an offspinner allrounder.
Predictably, with two arguably world-world left-arm off spinners Akeal Hosein and Gudakesh Motie also included, there was no room for Chase in the West Indies starting XI for any of the first three matches of the Series, The first two of which the West Indies won before failing to defend their posted twenty-over 226 en route to losing the third by as many as seven wickets!
Even more predictable than Chase’s non-involvement would have been the technically deficient Mayers’ lack of productivity in any of the matches he played. So said, so done! Mayers’ scores in the first three matches were 35, 17, and 0. Including those three innings Mayers’ last twenty T20I appearances for the West Indies had produced scores of 0, 17, 35, 10, 17, 25, 15, 1, 17, 51, 6, 1, 13, 20, 6, 29, 4, 1, 14 ad 73.
Wholly unflattering returns from Mayers, the ever-declining spiral of which eventually forced the Selectors to summon a possible replacement. To the hair-pulling chagrin of almost every West Indies cricket fan, however, the Selectors’ befuddling decision has since been to remove the obviously talented, still relatively young soon-to-be 27-year-old albeit underperforming Shimron Hetmyer and to replace him with yet another tried, tested and proven failure Johnson Charles!
In the last ten innings he has batted for the West Indies since his October 2022 recall to the team, Johnson Charles has recorded scores of 3, 29, 45, 24, 28, 118, 0, 3, 2, and 12. That’s just one century, bookmarked by as many as eight scores under 30. Thanks to the abnormal century, his average over those eight matches has been a deceptively flattering 26.40. Somewhat of an improvement on his overall West Indies T20I representative 43-innings average of 22.97, with just the one century and four half-centuries included.
Needless to say, the knee-jerk reaction of many West Indies cricket fans, some of whom have been around for very long and would be justifiably considered to be most knowledgeable, has been to attribute Charles’s recall as demonstrated fellow-countryman favoritism by West Indies Head Coach and Selection Panel Member, the St Lucian-born Daren Sammy. To what degree such accusations may be valid or invalid will, however, most likely never be known.
What can be said, with some degree of conviction, is that the aging, consistently unreliable, Charles’ selection makes very little sense to almost everyone. Particularly with a T20 World Cup to be played at home next June. Except, of course, the Selectors themselves: Messrs. Desmond Haynes, Roland Butcher, and Daren Sammy, who as a result of some of their most recent squad choices have long since been unflatteringly described as “three blind mice!”
Chase incapable of earning a place in the final XI, relegated to carrying towels and warming benches thus far; Mayers producing ever-declining scores; Russell’s man-of-the-match performance of 3/19-4 in the first T20I just as quickly followed by far more recently typical returns of 0/66-4 and 0/50-3,5 in the second and third. Three backward-step selection choices which have since served to undermine the effect of the West Indies’ most welcomed morale-boosting victories in the first and second matches of the series.
With Charles having been added to the squad for the final two matches, the fourth and fifth to be played at the typically spinner-friendly Trinidad & Tobago’s Brian Lara Cricket Academy, will his inclusion prove to be yet another West Indies selection blunder? Or will Charles completely justify his surprising recall with outstanding innings in whichever of the two scheduled matches he plays?
Only time will tell. In the interim, however, the lament of the average West Indies cricket fan will continue to be “two steps forward but four steps backward! How are we ever going to turn the corner?”