‘Juniors growing up on white-ball diet hurting West Indies cricket’ | Cricket News – Times of India

CHENNAI: For quite a while now, the West Indies have not been the force they once had been in world cricket. They have plummeted to new lows in Test and one-day cricket and shockingly failed to qualify for the 50-over World Cup in India last year.
Taking into account the challenge of having all the regional boards on the same page, Cricket West Indies (CWI) has had plenty of work to do to get the national team back to the upper echelons. It is making moves slowly but steadily, with one of the key initiatives being the setting up of a fully-functioning CWI Academy in Antigua.
The CWI academy’s head coach Ramesh Subasinghe, who was in Chennai along with assistant coach Rohan Nurse and seven budding players for a two-week camp at the Super Kings Academy, emphasised that Windies are “trying to address the issues by putting up a structure”.
“We are a group of countries, all the islands feed players into the system. Some islands have a bit of infrastructure and some do not have anything. It is quite challenging. This is the first time we have had an academy where players from different parts of the Caribbean can come together and train,” Ramesh, a former Sri Lankan first-class cricketer, told TOI.
While Ramesh is hopeful of a turnaround in the years to come, he admitted that developing long-format players has been a tough task since many have been “brought up on a white-ball diet”.
“The fundamentals and mental resilience could be well tuned in red-ball cricket and they can then be transferred to white-ball cricket. It is only T20 cricket that we have been doing well, we have a lot of work to do in 50-overs cricket as well.”