The cricketing fraternity owes massive reparations to the West Indies for their dedication and bravery to make the resumption of cricket in a post-COVID-19 era a reality.
If not for the Windies Cricket, England Cricket Board (ECB) could have lost as much as £380 million in the pandemic year.
However, more than two months of confinement in bio-secure environments, with zero freedom of movements and following strict protocols have taken a toll on the West Indies players, as revealed by their captain Jason Holder.
After putting on a marvellous display in the first Test match at Southampton, Holder’s men failed to replicate in the next two games and lost the series by 2-1.
The Windies skipper remarked that some of the members of the squad are mentally exhausted after enduring a challenging tour to England – a country worst-hit by the coronavirus.
“It’s been challenging, it’s been really challenging. Mentally some of the guys are a bit worn out. It could be this way for a little while so we’ve got to find ways to make it work,” stated Holder at the end of the third Test.
“Hopefully things could ease up throughout the world and probably guys can get out of the hotel a little bit more, but it has been challenging for sure.”
“We’ve been kept indoors for the last two months. The guys haven’t seen a bit of real life for a bit,” he added.
“It’s tough to constantly get up, you’re here, you open your curtains and you just see the cricket ground. You’re not hopping on the bus as you normally do.”
Holder further said that the inability of his batsmen to convert those starts into a big total is what led to Windies’ downfall in the last two Tests.
“If you look at our batting performance, we had plenty of starts, quite a few guys got half-centuries, got into the forties and thirties but didn’t kick on.”
“The difference with England is when Stokes got in he went big, when [Dom] Sibley got in he went big; unfortunately we didn’t do that,” Holder concluded.
