West Indies coach Phil Simmons said that he expects T20 superstar Chris Gayle to play key roles in the upcoming ICC T20 World Cup and said that he hopes that the left handed Jamaican will be ready.
“Chris, we have specific roles that we put on Chris and we trust that he is going to be ready and in form in everything,” Simmons said yesterday at a virtual press conference in Dubai.
Gayle recently took some time off from the bio-secure IPL bubble in order to be ready for the tournament.
“Having had a short rest from the game and the bubble we hope that he is going to come back fresh and ready to produce what we ask him to do,” Simmons added.
Simmons also said that he was not too worried with the current form of some of the players in the West Indies squad ahead of their T20 World Cup title defence.
Meanwhile, West Indies vice-captain, Nicholas Pooran, has turned out for the Punjab Kings but has not been in his best form, scoring 57 runs from five innings with a best of 32 against Rajasthan Royals when the tournament resumed.
“The thing about it once we sit down and we look at things, it is a case where I’m not too worried about Nicholas,” said Simmons.“Nicholas has been batting well. I think in the CPL [Caribbean Premier League] he batted well. I think there is a lot more pressure here and I think he is working hard enough and doing all that he has to do and sometimes it doesn’t come off but it will come off so I am not worried about him,” Simmons reasoned.
In the CPL, Pooran ended sixth on the runs chart and was the highest run scorer for the Guyana Amazon Warriors with 263 runs at a strike rate of 163.
Simmons also pointed out that while West Indies won the T20I series against Australia but lost the following two to South Africa and Pakistan prior to the CPL, the team would have used those matches as a bonding exercise.
“I think that’s a good point and is something we look at,” he said when asked about the gelling of the squad in major tournaments as compared to bilateral series.
“We know that in the 15 but turned out to be 11 games is that we need to get a bonding of the team and the squad and once we have that bonding and understanding of roles we do well in tournaments so it’s a point we have been looking at all the time.”
