After the two-match Test series against India, the Windies team will be facing the men in blue in five ODIs, which gets underway on Sunday, October 21 at Barsapara Stadium in Guwahati. Previously, Cricket West Indies (CWI) announced a pool of 25 members for the series and the 35-year-old all-rounder Dwayne Bravo hasn’t been included in the squad, something which furrowed many eyebrows.
The squad is expected to fly to India a couple of days later on October 10. In the meantime, Johny Grave, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CWI said that the team already consist of a lot of all-rounders, which led to Bravo’s exclusion. However, he also said that the door isn’t closed on Bravo and he needs to perform in the Super50 event in order to stake his claim back in the mix.
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As per the reports in Sportstar, Grave said, “Bravo’s issue is that he’s playing in an allrounder spot with Andre Russell, Pollard, Carlos Brathwaite, Rovman Powell who all did well in CPL, so there is a lot of options for selectors to choose from. But once he performs in Super50, the door remains open for Dwayne. The [benefit of the] Super50 now from the selectors’ point of view will be to look at players who aren’t in India and who don’t perform in India to [then] shuffle the pack for [the] Bangladesh [tour].”
He further added, “The reason the [longlist for the] ODI team was picked before Super50 is because players are flying out of the Caribbean on October 10 to be in India by October 12. There will be a camp in Guwahati before the first ODI game in that city is played. The T20 squad should reflect the best possible pool of players from CPL performances.”
Bravo made his ODI debut back in 2004 and has played for Windies in 164 matches in which he notched 2968 runs along with 199 wickets. His last appearance was during the match against India in Dharamshala back in October 2014. He recently led Trinbago Knight Riders (TKR) to victory on consecutive seasons in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL).
