Handwriting error shames WI Board

JOHANNESBURG: A mix-up over handwriting led on Monday to the latest of the mind-boggling blunders that have become the unwanted, but certainly not unwarranted, trademark of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB). Derrick Nicholas, the WICB’s cricket operations officer, e-mailed the squad for the forthcoming One-Day Internationals in South Africa to the media, initially excluding Shivnarine Chanderpaul, one of their most experienced and essential players, and including Carlton Baugh, the 21-year-old reserve wicket-keeper. An hour-and-a-half later, he issued a correction, replacing Baugh with Chanderpaul.

He got the other 14 correct, among them two newcomers – left-hand all-rounder Ian Bradshaw and right-hand batsman Kurt Wilkinson, both of Barbados – and two others not in the current Test squad – batsman Ricardo Powell, formerly of Jamaica, now Trinidad and Tobago, and off-spinner Ryan Hurley, another Barbadian. “When (chief cricket operations officer) Zoral Barthley passed the team on to me after he spoke to chairman of selectors (Sir Viv Richards) on the phone from South Africa, it was hard-written and had the name C-Paul which I interpreted as C-Baugh,” Nicholas explained by telephone from his office in Antigua. “Immediately the error was pointed out, I sent out the correction,” he added. The first report of Chanderpaul’s omission came as a shock but not a complete surprise.

The 29-year-old left-handed batsman, veteran of 70 Tests and 135 ODIs, was eliminated from the drawn Third Test in Cape Town after straining a thigh muscle in the second Test in Durban when he scored a brilliant, second innings 110, batting throughout with a runner. It was the 20th Test he has missed in the past four-and-a-half years through injury or illness. It was feared that either his thigh muscle or the middle finger of his right hand, that had to be pinned after it was broken in the final Test against Antigua last May, when he also scored a hundred, was the cause of another withdrawal. Fortunately, it proved to be merely another WICB error.

Baugh, batsman Daren Ganga, left-arm wrist spinner Dave Mohammed and fast bowler Adam Sanford are those presently in South Africa who will return to the Caribbean following the fourth and final Test at Centurion starting on Friday. Wavell Hinds, the fourth injured player forced to abort the tour, was scheduled to fly back to Jamaica yesterday to have a pulled groin muscle attended to. The four additions to the team have all been in form in the first round of the Carib Beer Series regional tournament. Bradshaw was “Man-Of-The-Match” in Barbados’ victory over Guyana, a match in which Wilkinson scored 116 and Hurley picked up two useful wickets in the first innings, and made a brisk 30.

Powell topscored with 77 in Trinidad and Tobago’s second innings of their match against the Leeward Islands. Bradshaw, 29, and West Indies youth team captain to England in 1993, is finally recognised at senior level after several seasons of consistent performances in regional competitions in both forms of the game. Wilkinson, 22, has been one of the brightest batting prospects since he was in the West Indies “B” team three seasons ago. He scored 125 in Barbados’ win in last season’s Carib final against Jamaica and followed up with another last Saturday in the first match this season.