BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – A Twenty20 tournament for emerging players in the Caribbean may be on the cards for next year.
Director of cricket Miles Bascombe said Cricket West Indies (CWI) and organizers of the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) are working collaboratively to identify the next generation of players to represent West Indies in the format on the international stage.
“There is some recognition that the CPL may not necessarily be where those stars would emerge, so we are working with CPL to have an emerging players’ regional T20 tournament,” Bascombe said during a CWI news conference on Monday in Bridgetown.
“We recognize in T20 cricket that we need a way to find our next crop of T20 players. We have had success in T20 cricket, and I’m sure the head coach [Darren Sammy] is anticipating more success as we play at home in this (T20) World Cup. But we generally still have to work hard at finding our next crop of emerging T20 stars.”
The T20 tournament is part of a suite of development projects that CWI plans to undertake to revitalize the game in the Caribbean in the coming years.
Bascombe said developing a sustained pathway to the international stage for men’s and women’s players was essential to the high-performance agenda.
“Pathway development will be key to our cricket system,” he said. “On the men’s side, we are almost where we want to be. We have players coming into the system formally from the Under-15 level, picking up talented players from 12 but generally from 13.
“We have structure for those players through to Under-19s, and we have recognized that at the Under-23 level, we still have leakages at that age group, and we are working to ensure that we have a program that helps to capture those players.
“Over the next few months and years, you will see a lot of work going into the men’s Under-23 program.”
On the women’s side, Bascombe said: “We only currently have senior women’s and Under-19s, and if we want to get to the top of world cricket in women’s cricket, we have to capture younger talent and have them playing the game at an earlier age, giving them more awareness, and skill development.
“We are working to introduce a women’s Under-16 program, which will begin to roll out this year and evolve into a women’s regional Under-16 tournament within a few years.”
In this regard, Bascombe said CWI has started working with coaches in the territories to bring alignment to the brand of play and performance indicators across formats.
“What that has looked like so far has been meeting between our head coaches and the territorial head coaches,” he said.
“This brand and performance indicators also have to be documented because the intention is for us to drive that West Indies brand of play down into our age group levels so that we create a brand that all West Indian cricketers play as they come through the pathway.”
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