BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – West Indies coach John Dyson has admitted to the regional team’s rigorous schedule this year but said players needed to prepare themselves properly in order to make it through the itinerary.
The Windies face India in a four-match One-Day International series beginning Friday in Jamaica, only days after returning from the ICC World Twenty20 Championship in England.
Following the India series, West Indies host Bangladesh in two Tests and three ODIs in July and August, before heading off to the ICC Champions Trophy in September. They also play three Tests in Australia in December.
“It’s a lot of cricket. It certainly is a lot of cricket. There’s not a lot of rest time in between but after that the players can look forward to two significant breaks and that’s at the end of Bangladesh leading up to the Champions Trophy and then after the Champions Trophy there’s another break leading into the tour of Australia at the end of the year,” Dyson said.
“It is a matter of preparing themselves as professional cricketers to say ‘we’ve got six more weeks of solid cricket and I’ll be back home’ which the players will be very happy about and then there’s a nice break.”
West Indies have endured a hectic schedule dating back to last year when they hosted Australia and Sri Lanka in the Caribbean before heading on to New Zealand for another Test and ODI series in December and January.
They hosted England between February and April in five Tests and ODIs before skipping off to England for another two Tests and three one-dayers, where they failed to win a single match.
Dyson said following on from the team’s capture of the Wisden Trophy in the Caribbean, he had been frustrated by the returns on the England tour.
“The tour of England was a disappointing tour for us. I thought we would play better cricket,” the former Australia opener explained.
“I thought we let ourselves down through the Test series and the one-day series. And when I say let ourselves down, if you go back to the first Test at Lord’s on the very first day, we dropped a number of catches that if they’d been taken, England would have been in a lot more trouble.
“We might have bowled them out for somewhere around 225 to 250 and instead they got 387 and that changes the mindset totally for the rest of the game.
“We had patches and I was hoping leading into [the World T20 Championship] we would have been more consistent.”
West Indies reached the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup before being eliminated by Sri Lanka last Friday.
The bulk of the squad arrived in Jamaica on Tuesday for the four-match series against India, with the first game scheduled for Sabina Park on Friday.
They play the second game on Sunday at the same venue before contesting the two final matches at the Beausejour Stadium in St Lucia on July 3 and 5 respectively.
