Tweet
West Indies coach John Dyson has questioned whether skipper Chris Gayle will be in shape to deliver the goods in the first Test at Lord's starting next Wednesday. Gayle's arrival from the Indian Premier League has been delayed until Monday, giving him just 48 hours to get acclimatised ahead of the clash with England.
The opening batsman has been in good form this year but Dyson is concerned that he will not be able to do himself justice with such poor preparation - and the coach needs all the assistance he can get after watching his side go down by 10 wickets to the Lions on Saturday.
"I've said all along, with the IPL in conjunction with this tour, even if he was arriving as we expected, that's not ideal," he said.
"It's not enough time for an ideal preparation (for a Test match) but we will work with it. The medical boys all say that, after that length of flight, you need a minimum of a couple of days to get over the jet lag and re-acclimatise and then you need a couple of days of practice.
"We were prepared to work around that and now that it's been extended out a bit further it puts more pressure on Chris and I suppose the people in the West Indies Cricket Board who made that decision."
Gayle was due to arrive in England on Sunday but has stayed on to play an extra game for the struggling Kolkata Knight Riders.
"Chris handles a lot of pressure and has played some magnificent cricket over the past 12 months in all forms of the game and he seems to take these sort of things in his stride," added Dyson.
"But the medical advice is that, when you fly that sort of distance, you need time to recover from the flight and re-acclimatise to the time zones. I also think you need a good couple of hits at least in the conditions you're going to play in."
Reflecting on his side's heavy defeat to the Lions at Derby, Dyson insisted on taking the positives out of the game.
"It's not what we would have liked but there were some positive things that came out of it," he added. "I thought Lendl Simmons played well, Shiv (Chanderpaul) again played well and Jerome Taylor's spell yesterday with the new ball was very encouraging given he hadn't played for a while."
a.top_betting_link_1 {background-image: url('/Images/skysports/fixturecal/icons/fix-bet.gif');background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:0% 50%;padding-left:18px;}
Comment