Adams: One day at a time

Leeds:It was not so much that the West Indies lost four of their five matches in the triangular NatWest Series as the inconsistency of their cricket that disappointed captain Jimmy Adams.

'You can do something fairly consistently and yet, for some reason, you don't get the results at the end of the day,' he reflected yesterday. 'But we just didn't perform consistently in any part of our game and that was most disappointing.'

The West Indies lost four of their five matches three to Zimbabwe to be eliminated from the final before a consolation victory by three runs over England.

'We showed in the West Indies that we can play consistently by doing the basics consistently but we fell down here,' Adams said.

He would not speculate on what effect results in the One-Day series would have on the team for the crucial third Test starting at Old Trafford, Manchester, on August 3.

'Time is going to tell but we have three very important matches coming up in the next month or so and I would like to think that we're strong enough mentally to go into them positively and play some really good, consistent cricket,' Adams added.

Meant a lot

'I'd like to look back in early September and say that while we didn't play well in the One-Day tournament we got everything together for the next three Test matches but it's not something I can predict now,' he said.

The captain acknowledged that last Thursday's narrow win over England in the last NatWest series meant a lot to us.

'It helped the whole team's psyche,' he observed. Even though it didn't get us into the final it just shows how much a win means under any circumstances.

While he conceded that the absence of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh removed the team's premier bowlers, Adams saw it as inadvertently serving a purpose.

'It gave everybody, not only the bowlers but the whole team, a taste of the fact that, in the near future, we will have to do without them,' he said.

That was very important in the context of where we're hoping to get to in the next few years.

There were very few pluses. Adams identified Mahendra Nagamootoo as one.

'I was really happy how Nagamootoo took to cricket on an international scale,' he said. I think he shouldered his responsibility very well for someone who was playing in conditions he didn't grow up in and was experiencing for the first time as he hadn't played in England before.

For him and (Ramnaresh) Sarwan to get a look in at this level and look really comfortable was a real bonus, he added.