Trend in captaincy going wrong for West Indies
HUGE INTEREST
To put that into perspective, the cheapest ticket for the Caribbean Premier League matches held in Fort Lauderdale in July was $23 (approx `1,542), less than one third of the price of the cheapest ticket for the India-West Indies T20s.
“From the day we announced the series, we have been flooded with calls for tickets so we knew people won’t hesitate to pay. But we didn’t anticipate tickets would be sold off so quickly,” said the official.
Organising the series wasn’t easy though. “Event rules in the US are far stricter than any other venue. We had to be particular about the documents that were to be submitted to get permission in time. A US based event management company too was hired through tender to manage the two matches,” he said.
BIGGEST HURDLE
The biggest hurdle, however, was visa approval. If visiting the US for sports-related activity, one has to apply for P1 visa, an athletic performance permission that normally takes at least a month to process.
To make it further complicated, US visa can’t be given offshore. It took some persuasion from BCCI president Anurag Thakur through diplomatic channels to ensure an exception was made.
“The players applied for visa in Jamaica and got it after arriving in Port of Spain,” said the BCCI official. PORT OF SPAIN: West Indies Test skipper Jason Holder didn’t get to play a single match in their victorious World Twenty20 campaign in India this year. Now, Carlos Brathwaite, hero of that final win over England, has been appointed T20 captain after having to sit out the last three Tests.
No one from the West Indies management has spoken about split captaincy, but it’s heading that way for them. Split captaincy need not be bad. Almost all Test teams have experimented with the concept with varying degrees of success.
But West Indies’ choice seems to be prompted by the absence of players who are good across formats and there seems to be a lack of clarity over how West Indies want their two skippers to play. To begin with, both are all-rounders with not-so-great records. Holder is more experienced than Brathwaite, but hasn’t performed consistently. He toiled for 86.2 overs taking one wicket in the Test series against India and scored just 132 runs in four innings. Almost after every Test, Holder’s performance came under review, but his position might have saved him from being axed. BIG-MATCH PLAYER Brathwaite hit those four sixes to take West Indies to the title at Eden Gardens, but is new to international cricket having played only just three Tests, eight T20Is and 14 ODIs. To be given the captaincy while trying to establish himself can affect one’s game. And this is a side with quite a few players with great T20 records --- Chris Gayle, Sunil Narine and Dwayne Bravo. However, the West Indies selectors have a completely different opinion.
Brathwaite doesn’t read much into the decision to make him T20 captain. “I think a team like this would be pretty easy to lead from the point of view that the dressing room is a fun place to be. I don’t think it will be a case where I have to negotiate too many egos,” he said on Monday. “I don’t want to get too deep into the psychology of changing leaders because all the guys are mature enough. We had some cases where players were captains and then the next series played under another captain.”
Brathwaite admitted to being hesitant and said talking to ousted captain Darren Sammy made the transition easier. “He just said congratulations and told me ‘it’s a big challenge’. He gave me his blessing,” he said. The pressure to perform while playing all formats will bother Brathwaite as captain as it did Holder. Virat Kohli got the captaincy only after becoming the leading run-scorer in all formats.