Our senior players need to lead

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6: I am really bothered by the lack of professionalism our senior international players are showing in league matches.

There are no warm-ups before games and there are no cool downs after games. These are things that should be happening — that our senior players should be taking back to the clubs, but I don’t see it happening.

How our youngsters going to be instilled with proper cricketing culture if our senior players aren’t leading the way?

If the senior players expose them to this, it will help instill the right way to do things, which can only benefit us down the road in international cricket.

We need to get back to the standard that it used to be, and even higher. If aren’t trying to improve, then we can’t expect a different result.

Every other country has taken it up a notch.

Professionalism

Gone are the days where you warm up for just five minutes. We should be taking every single moment to enhance our skills.

This is one of the things that we’re in control of — some things we can’t control. The clubs and the players are in charge of the warm-ups and cool downs.

If keep allowing this not to happen, then our standard will keep deteriorating.

We have to instill the professionalism into our cricketing culture.

At Warwick we try to get to a match an hour ahead of time to do warm-ups, especially if that club has nets, we’ll be there early to get in a net session.

We can work on our batting and bowling and then do some fielding drills.

Commitment

After the game we have a little cool down session for 20 minutes.

There are some people complaining we’re playing too much cricket right now with the T20 matches on Saturdays and the 50 Overs League in Sunday, but I think we need to be playing more cricket.

If you can’t commit to a three hour Twenty20 match on a Saturday, then it might be time to rethink how committed you are to the game.

There are other options out there if you don’t want to be fully committed to the sport like the Evening Cricket League or the Commercial Cricket League.

How are we going to get better at anything in life, unless we do more of it?

I can understand with guys who work and they have young families — this is a strain for them, but these aren’t the guys we should be concentrating on. We need to reach out to our youngsters and get that good cricket culture and professionalism instilled in them.

Youth

These are the one who have time.

It is the clubs fault when teams forfeit or default. If they took care of their youth programmes, they wouldn’t have this problem.

Clubs should have Under-14 and Under-17 players who can filter in for the Twenty20 matches.

We need to go after the guys who want to play cricket and forget about the guys who don’t really want to play.

At Warwick we are getting out about 20 guys for training sessions. They are still developing, but one thing they have already developed is a love for the sport. They really, really love cricket.

We have the talent and they are committed. The problem now is instilling that winning mentality. They are still working on being competitive.

Improvement

They still have a ways to go but I have seen such good improvement already.

They are sacrificing and committed to doing it.

We know it’s going to be a stiff learning curve but in three to four years, we’ll be ready.