Former West Indies captain, Jimmy Adams believes that there should be more exposure for local T20 players.
Adams shared his opinion during a recent press briefing where he indicated that he was in no way diminishing or downplaying the positive impact of the Caribbean Premier League (CPL).
The Cricket West Indies’ Director of Cricket made it clear that he was speaking in his personal capacity, stating, “I think we need more exposure for more T20 players in the Caribbean.
“I am speaking personally. This is just my opinion. In terms of developing any sort of talent, you start with your ground zero numbers, your baseline numbers and if I could wave a magic wand, I would love to have a regional tournament that is stocked with only regional players so we could see more regional players playing T20 cricket,” he said.
Adams added that there was also an advantage of having more regional coaches exposed to coaching T20 cricket with a view to those coaches impacting the development of the format further down the pipeline.
Unlike the CPL, Adams suggested that the tournament could be structured in such a way that the stand alone tournament would be implemented into the developmental programmes and work from the junior levels all the way up to senior cricket in order to give players early exposure.
Recently, West Indies’ limited overs captain, Kieron Pollard shared a similar opinion.
“For the last 10 years or so, we have had, again, sort of the same guys playing T20 and sort of dominating as we go along,” Pollard contended.
“One of the things that for us that we need to do, especially in the Caribbean, is we need to have another tournament other than CPL, whereas we can unearth new talents.
“When we had the Caribbean T20, that was an opportunity for people to bring new talents from different parts of the Caribbean and we are able to have a sort of nucleus for this last generation also but since CPL has come in, yes, it’s a franchise-base system, but we have only the opportunity to sort of recycle the same players over and over and over again.
“So it’s something we need to look at but there are some cricketers and a lot of young cricketers looking forward to playing and contributing to West Indies cricket,” said Pollard.
