Deonarine and Fudadin stuck in

[Peter R]

JA; no visa... WICB strikes again!!!

[Me]

Nash, Pagon, Sarwan ready to go.

[Peter R]

Pagon have him visa??

[Me]

Him better get it if him nuh have it.

[Dunny]

West Indies' tour of England gets off to an ominous start as rain stops play

• Few household names among Darren Sammy's team
• Only 12 players in the country, three more awaiting visas

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• Vic Marks at Hove
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 5 May 2012 18.14 BST
• Article history

West Indies captain Darren Sammy at Hove County Cricket Ground where no play was possible due to the weather. Photograph: Southern News & Pictures (SNAP)

Maybe Chris Gayle has worked it out. Three years ago he was here as captain of West Indies for two Test matches, which took place even earlier in May. At one point he mumbled that it would not bother him greatly if Test cricket did not exist, which caused a bit of a stir; West Indies forfeited without a fight the Wisden Trophy, which they had won only weeks before, and a desultory series came to an end at Chester-le-Street on 18 May – to the relief of just about everyone involved.
The cricket was horrendously one-sided, the weather was dire and Ravi Bopara kept scoring hundreds. Well, at least one of those elements remains three years on – it was freezing and dank and dingy at Hove, and no play was possible. It may well be that all three elements will have applied by the end of the three-match series, which starts at Lord's on 17 May.
Gayle is currently in India, plying his trade for Royal Challengers Bangalore in the IPL. But he will be back for West Indies for the ODIs, having withdrawn from his contract to play Twenty20 cricket with Somerset. It may have warmed up by then.
Darren Sammy, the captain of this West Indies side, will be delighted to have Gayle back. "It will be easy," he says. "He is the best one-day batsman in the world. He plays very well going into many dressing rooms all around the world. I don't think coming into ours will be any different."
Gayle's side looked miserable three years ago on a hastily arranged, but lucrative tour – they replaced Zimbabwe at the last minute and were handsomely rewarded for doing so. But Sammy is unlikely to permit his team to complain too much about the conditions.
"We expect it to be like this", he says. "It's not the Caribbean. We have programmed our minds to manage it [the freezing temperatures]. We have some experience of it."
Sammy then outlined how he had been on the Lord's groundstaff for three years, as well as playing in the Lancashire League. Ravi Rampaul has played in Ireland. Then, after some head-scratching, it was established that Kemar Roach had played for Worcestershire and Darren Bravo for Nottinghamshire.
This highlighted how times have changed. In the past, the West Indies side were household names, not only in the Caribbean but throughout the shires. There was the Lancastrian Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards and Joel Garner, up from Somerset, Gordon Greenidge and Malcolm Marshall, stalwarts of Hampshire.
Then, a West Indies tour meant they were just taking a little break from county cricket. This West Indies team might be one of the most zealous to arrive in this country, under the impressive leadership of Sammy. It is also one of the most anonymous.
There is Shivnarine Chanderpaul, 10,000 Test runs to his name after 140 Tests, but even he craves anonymity. Roach and Fidel Edwards are quick and demand attention. Darren Bravo has scored a lot of runs in the past 12 months. But pool all the charisma within the squad together and it might match that of the prodigal Gayle or any one of the giants of the Eighties.
So this is nowhere near the West Indies of old. Indeed the status of a West Indies tour has been transformed. Now they are shoe-horned into the early part of the season. They are good only for the matinees. The glamour sides come in the second half of the summer.
At Hove, the squad diligently went off to the indoor nets once play was abandoned, at least 11 of them did. It transpires that West Indies have only 12 players here at the moment and one of those, Fidel Edwards, currently has a niggle. There will be no selection problems on Sunday morning at Hove.
There are three absentees – "It's a little bit to do with visas," explained Sammy. They are Marvin Samuels, who is coming from India, where he has been on the books of the Pune Warriors, and Guyanese cricketers Narsingh Deonarine and Assad Fudadin, who are expected to arrive soon via Jamaica.
So far this trio have not missed much. But this hardly represents the smoothest of starts to a tour, especially since this trio have yet to find a way through immigration at Heathrow.