If performance merits selection, Guyana Jaguars Captain Leon Johnson should be a certainty for a West Indies recall following an extraordinary season in the 2015/16 West Indies Cricket Board (WICB)/Professional Cricket League (PCL) Regional four-day tournament.
After grabbing his Test cricket opportunity with both hands, scoring a fluent 66 against Bangladesh on debut, before going on to play against South Africa in their back yard, Johnson was dropped after the South Africa tour despite averaging nearly 40 in Test cricket (39.28) after just four matches.
The 28-year-old has since been knocking on the door to International cricket with runs, regional title wins and all-round hard work.
A year has passed and Johnson has improved both as a batsman and as a leader but still the desired recall to the West Indies team has managed to elude him.
The selectors, it seems, have faith in less statistically and technically accomplished batsmen.
Johnson smashed 810 plus runs this season, the first and only batsman to venture into the 800-run club. His 92 against Trinidad and Tobago Red Force and his last score of 93 against Jamaica in the final round, should have been converted to three figures which would have
complemented his two centuries this season (107 and 111 not out) quite nicely.
He jostled teammate Vishaul Singh who, at one point, was the only batsman with 600 runs on the way to becoming the top run getter.
Barbados’ Shai Hope has perhaps extended his own lifeline with big hundreds this domestic season but he was unable to match the Guyanese skipper’s voracious appetite for runs this year.
For a batsman that has been overlooked by the West Indies selectors the past year, despite being appointed skipper of the West Indies President’s XI team a few months ago ahead of the home series against Australia, Johnson has batted his way to a deserving recall.
He also became the youngest captain to win back-to-back Regional four-day titles.
In the current West Indies Test team, only Darren Bravo (41.50) averages more than Johnson’s 39.28 and, during his short stint, Johnson has shown the aptitude to bat out of his usual middle-order position when he played as a make-shift opener during his first taste of International cricket.
Among the current young crop of Test batsmen the likes of Jermaine
Blackwood (32.08), Hope (35.82), Kraigg Brathwaite (42.06) and Rajendra Chandrika (25.14), who have been playing in the PCL Franchise four-day tournament over the past two seasons, only Braithwaite, who has eight fifties and four hundreds in his Test career, has slightly better batting averages than the Guyanese whose arithmetic mean is 35.84.
The former Guyana Amazon Warriors player has surpassed his reputation as just a stylish middle-order batsman who can score almost anywhere to arguably the best tactical Captain in the Region,
leading a fairly young Guyana side to back-to-back Regional four-day titles.
In the process the team has gone unbeaten for 18 games since 2014.
The Jags skipper has also been able to command respect and manage his players on the field with relative ease and although he has not played International cricket in nearly a year, the West Indies A batsman was still given a retainer contract as it is evident that the West Indies selectors are keen on having him play a role in the batting department or as a future leader. A Shivnarine Chanderpaul-less West Indies Test team now means that players like Johnson, Hope, Bravo, Blackwood and whoever else is lucky to catch the eyes of the selectors, can be the future mainstay of the West Indies batting cog as they continue to rebuild.
However, conversion of fifties to hundreds will be key for Johnson who has already scored 28 half-centuries but only managed to reach triple figures four times, a problem common among most of the aforementioned batsmen.
Lastly, with June’s Tri-Nations One Day International (ODI) series
to be played here among Australia, South Africa and the West Indies, if the WICB is indeed strict on the policy that only players who participated and performed well in the Regional four-day tournaments will be eligible for international selection, Johnson has certainly fulfilled all the major requirements necessary for a recall and should be.
