Nurse: Stroke it, don't poke it!

Seymour Nurse, one of the most prolific and respected batsmen Barbados has ever produced, has some simple advice for beleaguered West Indies batsmen ahead of the second Test against Australia.

"If I was the manager and I was asked what to do, I would tell the guys to go out there and play cricket the West Indies' way," the former West Indies star and Under-19 manager told Nation-Sport yesterday.

"We are playing too much like the old English. We are not attacking the ball. We have got to fight fire with fire."

No West Indian tried to dominate the Australia attack in the opening Test in which team scores of 82 and 124 led to an emphatic defeat by an innings and 126 runs.

Nurse, who scored 2 523 runs in 29 Test matches at an average of 47.60, said little could be gained from "jucking".

"If you don't attack the bowling, you are going to run into trouble. If you are going to go down, you have to down fighting. You have got to play shots," said Nurse, a former coach.

"Everybody is doing the same thing. I don't know what instructions they are getting. They just want to `juck' and go back in.

"West Indian cricketers are not `pokers'. I don't know where we got this training from."

He said star batsman Brian Lara should come in at the accustomed place of No. 5, instead of at No. 3.

The double world-record holder failed in both innings in Brisbane, falling for a duck and four to Glenn McGrath in both innings.

"I am not saying that Lara is the problem for the West Indies not making runs, but he is the key man," Nurse said. "When he goes in early, he is going to be exposed to fresh fast men. These fellas are going to be waiting for him. "If we can get him in there when the sun has shone on the fielding side for three hours, it would be a different story."

Nurse joined those who believed the West Indies' problems were more of a mental than technical nature. Not enough emphasis was placed on fitness, he stressed.

"It is a mental problem and you can only correct that by getting fit," he said. "You must have a programme whereby you do a lot of exercising, run long distances, and so on."

He pointed to American golf sensation Tiger Woods, who reportedly runs for six hours daily.

"When we were playing, I used to runs miles and miles and miles. You can only make runs if you are fit. You cannot make a hundred if you don't have stamina."

Nurse was a member of the West Indies team that toured Australia in the 1960-61 tied Test series and he recalled that there were events that reduced him to tears.

"I was at the beginning of my career and that was the first time I had ever cried," he said. "We lost some Test matches that we should never have lost, but we got some bad breaks. "I cried and I said I would never cry again. It was for the love of the game."

When he next faced the Aussies in the Caribbean in 1965, Nurse made the first of his two double-centuries in Tests.