Chanderpaul feels captaincy heat

"There will always be pressure in this job, but someone has to do it," said Chanderpaul during his team’s training session at a windswept Nelson Park yesterday.

"No one expected it to be easy. You’ve either got to give up or get tougher."

Since being appointed to replace Brian Lara last March in the midst of the acrimonious sponsorship dispute between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the Players’ Association, the 31-year-old Guyanese has seen his side to victory in just one of 12 Tests.

Ironically, the one success enjoyed by the regional side in 15 One-Day Internationals before today’s encounter with New Zealand at McLean Park came with Chanderpaul off the field suffering from a virus and Sylvester Joseph in charge of the depleted team that got the better of hosts Sri Lanka in Colombo last August.

The captain also conceded that the challenges of leadership were taking a toll on his batting, suggesting that he needed help from his teammates to see him out of a slump in form that started in Sri Lanka, continued in the three-Test series last November in Australia and has extended to the opening matches of this tour. "It’s been a long time that I haven’t got a decent score and that has been at the back of my mind," Chanderpaul admitted.

"I’ve been talking a lot with the guys about it and hopefully they can help me through a couple of innings. I don’t think it’s just one thing that has caused this, it’s a lot of things put together. Hopefully I can get it sorted out soon."

The current captain’s experience is nothing new in the nearly 11 years since Australia ended the West Indies’ unprecedented 15-year unbeaten run in Test series. All the men at the helm since that time — Richie Richardson, Courtney Walsh, Lara (twice), Jimmy Adams, Carl Hooper and now Chanderpaul — have been unable to make any significant difference to the team’s staggering decline in fortunes despite some heroic individual performances.

Only Walsh and Lara kept on playing at the highest level after being replaced as captain, and unless he can somehow engineer a dramatic turnaround in his side’s performances, especially in the three-Test series against the Black Caps, Chanderpaul may very well have to consider whether it would not be better for the team and his own personal form to pass on the responsibility of leadership to someone else.