West Indies legend Clive Lloyd believes fitness is an area West Indies should improve on as they prepare to head into their series against New Zealand.
Speaking on the Mason and Guest radio programme lately, the two-time World Cup-winning captain noted “I am not sure the fitness side of our cricket is right.”
Lloyd explained, “I think they need to get fitter because you notice if you drop five, six catches in a Test series, you’re going to lose it. There’s no doubt about this. People make up, you give a guy a chance or two in a Test match, if he is a good enough player, he’ll get a hundred and some get big hundreds so if we’re dropping eight or 10 catches, you’re behind the eight ball all the time.”
Three T20Is are scheduled for November 27, 29 and 30 while the two Tests are booked for December 3-7 and 11-15. This is expected to be the first series since the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic to be played in front of an in-house audience.
The T20Is will be the start of an 11-month schedule of matches building up to the ICC T20 World Cup, rescheduled for October 2021 in India.
Lloyd also known as the “Super Cat” suggested that in addition to improved fitness, in order to improve West Indies
cricket in its entirety, there should be a system in place to have out of form players rekindle their mojo.
“We have to have a training schedule, we now have the Stanford ground (now Coolidge Cricket Ground, Antigua), that should be our stomping grounds for the guys who need to get back in form, they should have coaches down there helping them with their game.”
West Indies lead selector Roger Harper recently said West Indies head coach Phil Simmons and coaches in Barbados are to design a programme that they hope will help out-of-favour wicketkeeper/ batsman, Shai Hope, rediscover his form and live up to his potential.
Hope has been dropped from the West Indies team for the tour following scores of 16, 9, 25, 7, 17 and 31 during a disastrous run of form the three-Test series in England in July. Harper believes the break will be helpful to the middle-order batsman. “Shai is a player who I think has a tremendous future in Test cricket but at the moment he needs to reorganize his Test match game and get his batting in the longest version, back to its best,” Harper said. Lloyd also opined, “If we had A-teams and A-team tours, young Shai Hope should have had a little stint with the A-team to build his confidence back as England did with Nasser Hussain and [Mark] Ramprakash.”
