Lloyd Dismisses Rift As A Rumour (18 December 1998)

18 December 1998

Lloyd Dismisses Rift As A Rumour

By Tony Cozier

DURBAN - Clive Lloyd yesterday firmly refuted speculation about rifts and dissension within the beleaguered West Indies cricket team in South Africa.

"That's the first thing you hear when any team is struggling as we have done so far and has lost as badly as we did in Port Elizabeth," the manager said. "It's easy to go on hearsay but I'm disappointed by the reports I've read coming back from the West Indies that certain players aren't speaking to the captain, that there is no harmony and so on.

"We had a very long and frank meeting after the defeat in the second Test," he added. "The guys knew that they performed way below their potential. They knew they let themselves down and let all their supporters down."

He continued: "It was a chance to thrash things out and face some harsh home truths. We couldn't have just left there whistling in the dark as if nothing had gone wrong.

"The captain was very straight with some of the players, as he had to be. I think if they were honest with themselves they know they deserved it. He was also hard on himself, as he had to be.

"It's the kind of session we used to have in my days as captain and we never heard anything about divisions then," Lloyd, the most successful and long-serving of all West Indies captains, recalled. "After the dust had settled, it usually brought us closer together and we came back stronger.

"We were down the same 2-0 in Australia two years ago, we did the same sort of soul-searching then and came back to win the third Test," he noted. He said be believed the same thing would happen now.

"I'm not trying to place too much store on the victory (over a Natal XI) on Wednesday because the opposition wasn't the strongest," he said. "But they did have three Test players in the side (Jonty Rhodes, Lance Klusener and Andrew Hudson) and it was a victory. It has given the players the lift we needed."

Lloyd recognised that a sterner test would follow in the four-day match against a powerful South Africa "A" team starting tomorrow.

Source :: The Barbados Nation (https://www.nationnews.com/)