Bizarre Rovman Powell selection
THE WINDIES selectors have made a habit out of bamboozling cricket followers in the region with some, shall we say, less than expected decisions.
Sometimes I get the feeling that the selectors are intent on going against the grain just to appear to be less than predictable. It’s an indication of the troubled times we are having in West Indies cricket. It’s a truism that the better a team is performing, the less chopping and changing exists. The opposite is true. The worse a team is performing, the more likely it is for selectors to clutch at straws and the greater the likelihood for strange decisions.
The selection of Rovman Powell as interim captain for the three-match One-Day International series against Bangladesh, is, at best, mysterious, and at worse, quite bizarre.
Powell is still finding his feet in international cricket. He averages in the mid-20s in ODIs and while he has shown glimpses of genuine ability, one couldn’t make the case that he would be an automatic member of the team in say, a year from now. While the trajectory of his performance has generally been on the up, the truth is that he performed very poorly in India. His limitations to high quality spin were again exposed. Granted he was not the only one. To make him captain now, even on a part-time basis, seems premature, to say the least.
What makes the whole thing more strange is that Carlos Brathwaite, the Twenty20 captain has been brought back. If they were looking for someone to hold the fort until Holder comes back, why not give it to the man who already captains the team in a white-ball format?
Brathwaite should never have been selected as our T20 captain to begin with, but since he already holds that portfolio, he should be the man to take over the ODI team on this short-term basis. Brathwaite led the Combined Colleges and Campuses with aplomb to win the last staging of the Regional Super50. That should have also tilted the thing in his direction.
It’s interesting that the team’s most senior batsmen were not considered. Both Marlon Samuels and Daren Bravo were not seen as suitable. Shai Hope and Roston Chase are now senior players, and for them to also be overlooked, tells a story. The only thing is that us, as onlookers, don’t know the plot.
I’m wishing Powell all the best though. He is a bright, articulate young man, who will represent himself well in front of the media. The decision to appoint him is baffling, to say the least. This is West Indies cricket, though. We are in desperate times, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Powell’s selection appears to be not only a desperate move. It’s like a drowning man clutching at straws.