…first four–day game set from today at Bourda

TAGENARINE Chanderpaul, Gudakesh Motie, Kevin Sinclair, Tevin Imlach and Shamar Joseph have been selected in the West Indies Test squad for their Australia tour.

This has forced the Ramnaresh Sarwan-led national selection panel to invite arguably the youngest group of cricketers to trials preparation for the regional first-class tournament since the Shell Shield days in the mid-1960s.

The unavailability of the region’s most successful first-class captain due to his retirement last year after leading Guyana to his sixth title as captain, has added to the problem.

Left-arm spinner Veerasammy Permaul, who last year became the only Guyanese with 500 regional first-class wickets and 600 first-class wickets overall, is now 34 and the oldest player invited.
Matthew Nandu and Anthony Adams have been appointed captains for trial games and this suggests that Permaul is no longer being looked at in a leadership position.

At 14, and with no experience of red-ball first-division cricket, national U-15 batting all-rounder Adrian Hetmyer, whose centuries and double centuries have come against his peers at the U-13 & U-15 levels where some of the bowlers are as young as nine years.

I am a big fan of young Hetmyer, the son of former national U-19 and present senior Berbice inter county batter Seon Hetmyer, and nephew of West Indies batter Shimron Hetmyer, but his name in the list befuddles me.

Despite his obvious talent which suggests that if handled correctly, he could be one for the future, he is yet to play at the regional U-17 or U-19 levels and has never played a two-innings BCB match. The BCB has not held a two-day first-division tournament since 2019.

Another surprise was the selection of national U-19 player Zachary Jodah, who had no outstanding performances in the last regional U-19 tournament and is indicative of how small the pool of high-quality players has become and the drastic decline in local first-division cricket.

When you look at the names of players called to prepare for the 2024 first-class season, most of them lack the standard of players who could NOT make it to ‘Trials’ two decades ago.
Only the Georgetown Cricket Association (GCA) staged any ‘red-ball’ first-division cricket in the past two years, and only a handful.

Local cricket boards and associations lament that sponsors are reluctant to support two-day cricket and would rather put their money in ‘white-ball’ cricket, especially the T20 format.
In the past when I played in the 1990s and 2000s, three-day, first-division cricket was played on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in Demerara and on Saturday, Sunday and the following Saturday in Berbice where I also played for Bermine (now Tucber Park).
Another reason given for a lack of two-day first-division cricket is the players’ inability to get ‘time off’ from their jobs while in the city, cricket grounds are rarely available for two consecutive days on weekends.
Guyana has dominated regional four-day cricket since the franchise system was introduced in 2015 because Guyanese players were not selected for international duty, which made the other teams weaker and most of the national players would play in Trinidad, Barbados and North America where more cricket was played.
If more two-day first-division cricket is not played here, Guyana might still do well in what many cricket pundits say is the shortest and lowest standard of regional first-class cricket.
It will become even lower with the exodus of our better players to the global T2O leagues and if this is allowed to continue and other Caribbean territories emulate Guyana in their national trials, it won’t be long before the West Indies becomes irrelevant as a Test-playing entity.
Trial match teams:
Anthony Adams XI: Adams (Captain), Sachin Singh, Rampertab Ramnauth, Kevlon Anderson, Akshaya Persaud, Zachary Jodah, Zeynul Ramsammy, Joshua Persaud, Aryan Persaud, Junior Sinclair, Quentin Sampson, Rivaldo Phillips, Sylus Tyndall, Malcom Hubbard, Adrian Hetmyer, Bruce Vincent and Clinton Pestano.

Matthew Nandu XI: Nandu (Captain), Raymon Perez, Shamar Yearwood, Kemol Savory, Richie Looknauth, Brandon Jaikaran, Jonathan Rampersaud, Johnathan Van Lange, Gulcharran Chulai, Veerasammy Permaul, Nial Smith, Thaddeus Lovell, Ronsford Beaton, Ashmead Nedd, Ronald Ali-Mohamed, Ushadeva Balgobin and Steven Sankar.