Beleagured West Indies’ captain Darren Sammy is taking a rest at a time when the Windward Islands need him more than ever.
The Windwards play a confident Combined Campuses and Colleges (CCC) outfit in a crucial four-day semi-final in the 2011 WICB Regional First-class Championship starting today at the 3Ws Oval.
Despite not being injured, Sammy, also the de facto Windwards’ skipper, has opted to take a self-imposed break after the regional team returned to the Caribbean last Friday from their unsuccessful World Cup campaign.
His untimely absence will be felt even more as the Windwards have suffered a double blow with the loss of two of their key seam bowlers in left-armer Kenroy Peters and steady right-armer Mervin Matthew.
Both have taken 21 wickets at under 20 runs apiece.
It meant that the Windwards were forced to call up inexperienced Dominican left-arm pacer Vincent Lewis and tall Vincentian pacer Keswick Williams to join the pacy Nelon Pascal.
But the Windwards have received a big batting boost with the return of West Indies’ left-handed opener Devon Smith, who is coming off a fairly good World Cup.
CCC, who topped all the regional teams and England Lions in the seven preliminary rounds with 57 points, will have a psychological advantage.
They defeated the Windwards by 33 runs in the opening series at the same venue even though their opponents have won three and lost two of their five clashes since 2008.
“I think we have a very good chance of beating the Windward Islands. We have been playing good cricket over the season. The guys have been taking it one game at a time. The players are confident.
“We have certain individual players who are doing well and we are doing well as a team so tomorrow’s [today’s] game, we are going to approach it full of confidence and we will make it as tough as possible a cricket game that we can play,” coach-player Floyd Reifer said after yesterday’s final net session.
With the pitch again likely to favour spin bowling, CCC, who routed the Windwards for paltry totals of 174 and 145, will again look to their spin twins Ryan Austin (32 wickets, ave: 20.93) and Kavesh Kantasingh (28 wickets, ave: 19.85) as well as leg-spinning all-rounder Nkrumah Bonner (14 wickets, ave: 20.00), to roll over their opponents.
“I maintain that to win a cricket match, you’ve got to bowl out a team twice. You’ve got to take 20 wickets. I think we have been doing well as a bowling unit all season but we’ve just got to keep batting and bat well,” Reifer said.
Smith and Andre Fletcher, who has scored 522 runs with two hundreds and two half-centuries at an average of 40.15, will shoulder the brunt of the Windwards’ batting.
Support will come from middle-order batsman Keddy Lesporis (376 runs, ave: 31.33) and captain Liam Sebastien (204 runs, ave: 29.14) and recalled opener Johnson Charles.
Like CCC, the Windwards may also go into the match with three spinning options with young off-spinning all-rounder Dalton Polius joining Sebastien and left-armer Garey Mathurin.
Mathurin has made a massive impact with 32 wickets at 18.03 runs apiece in his first full season to be the joint second-highest wicket-taker with Austin.
Sebastien, who is familiar with the 3Ws Oval pitch, has 19 wickets at 19.36 each with his underrated off-spin.
This should again cause problems for the CCC batsmen as in the first series when he took three wickets in each innings.
In that game Austin, Kantasingh and Bonner, who have a five-wicket haul, shared 18 of 20 Windwards’ wickets.
