Going into the test series against Australia Down Under, it is absolutely safe to assert that the West Indians begin as the underdogs for the series. The men from the Caribbean were thrashed by an inexperienced Cricket Australia XI side in the warm up clash. Skipper Jason Holder though, is least worried about the underdog tag associated with his team.
“At the end of the day we haven’t been at our best, we haven’t been near our best in the recent past but I still have faith that we can turn things around, Holder said. But it has to be a systematic approach where we just set things up, set up a good foundation in terms of our system at home in cricket and I think once we can do that we can see us producing some better cricketers in international cricket.”
“In the recent past we’ve had the high performance centre in Barbados but, unfortunately, we haven’t had a group in there for the last year-and-a-half, two years and it’s something that has reaped results.” “We have, I think, eight or nine of our players who have been through the high performance centre currently in our Test side. I think once we can be consistent there in terms of keeping the programs going, you know finances are a big problem back home as well. “Again it’s all out of my hands but I can only hope that we can keep these kinds of things going so we can, in a sense, produce cricketers,” Holder said.
“We know the Australians will come very hard at us, we know they will be very competitive, so we’ve just got to absorb that pressure early on in those instances as batsmen and when we bowl just try to be a little bit more patient than we have been in the past. Then I’m sure we can get these results,” said a positive Holder.