(Trinidad Express) West Indies coach Ottis Gibson has had his say to star batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul and has left the ball in his crease.
Public criticisms by Chanderpaul of West Indies Cricket Board CEO Dr Ernest Hilaire and the coaching staff dominated the headlines ahead of the first Digicel Test match between the Windies and Pakistan in Guyana. Chanderpaul was selected and his unbeaten second innings top-score of 36 contributed to West Indies eventually winning the match at the National Stadium at Providence by 40 runs on Sunday.
Yesterday at the Pegasus hotel, the day after his first Test win in charge of the team, Gibson was asked about what now was his working relationship with the veteran Chanderpaul.
He said: “If he had issues, I would have expected him to come and speak to me about the issues he had rather than going in the press and saying all the things he said.
“But he’s come back into the team, I’ve sat down and spoke to him. I told him what I expected from him. He understands what it means to be a part of the team, or that team that I’m trying to create and hopefully he will buy into that. If he chooses not to buy into that, then that’s his problem, but my work is building a team.”
Gibson said Sunday’s win on a difficult surface for batsmen was a “great achievement”, for which he credited the entire team, but especially the batting effort on the first day of the game.
“To be able to bat out that first day and understand how difficult it was going to be and then the contributions from the lower order. One of the things that we’ve sort of changed in our practice is that everybody is a batsman, so everybody has to bat in the nets or be seen to be trying to improve their batting. That was a big difference in the match as well, the runs from nine, ten, jack made a huge difference.”
But Gibson, himself a former West Indies seamer, was particularly full of credit for his captain Darren Sammy whose fourth five-wicket haul in Tests on Sunday gave him seven in the match and the Man-of-the-Match prize.
Sammy’s place in the side has come under pressure because of his meagre returns with bat and ball since taking up the captaincy late last year. He had collected just two wickets and ten runs in his previous Test series in Sri Lanka and had a disappointing World Cup earlier this year.
But Gibson said yesterday: “I for one am very proud of him with all the stick that he’s been getting.
“He’s remained very humble and he just got on with his job. He feels the pressure like anybody else and he does his job. He works very hard at his cricket. For him to have had some success yesterday was very pleasing for the whole team as well, but obviously more importantly for him as a player. It takes the sting out of some of the criticism that he’s been getting for a while.”
And the coach threw out this final thought: “You have people with real talent and ability that you look to mostly and they do well for you. But they bring something else, there’s a certain baggage. Then you have somebody with less ability that you know has a strong character and will fight for you every day. And maybe we need some more of those sort of people… Maybe that’s something for the selectors to think about.”
