Gap between Test and domestic quality causing inconsistency – Simmons

Phil Simmons, the West Indies head coach, has expressed concern over the “up-and-down” nature of the team’s performances over the course of the Test series against India, and believes the inconsistency may have something to do with the quality gap between Test cricket and the region’s domestic cricket.

“I think the series was a little bit too up-and-down,” Simmons said. “We played well across maybe two hours, three hours sometimes, and the next two hours we would be down. And I think that was, for me, the major disappointment. We’ve shown that we can do things but not consistently enough. We batted well in Jamaica, but we went and did the same things we did in the first Test [again] in the third Test. It’s disappointing that we weren’t consistent enough.”

Simmons said some of the West Indies batsmen might need to tighten up their techniques to be more consistent at Test level, but said the process should be happening in domestic cricket.

“I think in some cases you have to adjust techniques, which is a sad thing because it’s something that we should be doing at a level below,” Simmons said. “I think the same thing with mentality because when we come up here it’s a lot harder to get runs and get wickets. I think at our domestic level it’s a lot easier, that patience and that time at the crease and things, if we bat two sessions in a domestic game a lot of the guys playing here would have a hundred or more. But if you bat two sessions here, it might be 60 or 70, so the patience at the domestic level is not tested as much as up here.”

Calling for a unified approach to lifting the standard of cricket, Simmons wanted the coaching staff of the Test team to meet the coaches of the domestic teams regularly.

“There’s a lot of things that I have asked for, and it’s not coming to fruition,” he said. “I’ve asked for coaches to meet twice, maybe three times a year, and discuss cricket and so on. We need to make sure that whatever we’re doing upstairs is going down to everybody.

“You and me might be two coaches and might coach differently but the same objective we have to have. If we don’t have the same objective, then we spin it up in muddles. I think that’s lacking. It’s quite a few things to be fixed, but at the end of the day the quality of cricket that is downstairs is not good enough for the maturity of the players to be quicker.”

Other measures, he said, would include improving the facilities all around the region.

“Things like our pitches and our practice facilities need to be …

continue reading in source www.espncricinfo.com