Pay as you fail

In a desperate bid to end their general shoddiness, West Indies players are likely to have to pay for their mistakes in the fifth and final Test against South Africa, starting in Kingston, tomorrow.

But David Holford, the former West Indies allrounder who is chief executive of the West Indies Players' Association, yesterday termed the proposal absolute rubbish.

The scheme is only at the experimental stage and is to be judged in the context of improved performance, West Indies team manager Ricky Skerritt said yesterday.

He said the proposal had come from captain Carl Hooper and coach Roger Harper and was to have been discussed with the players in Kingston yesterday. He did not go into specifics.

As manager, it's my job to see how best it can be implemented.

A Trinidad newspaper, quoting an unnamed source, reported last weekend that the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) would impose fines for dropped catches, misfields and injudicious strokes as a result of the team's poor showing in the series that South Africa lead 2-0.

Both Skerritt and chief executive Gregory Shillingford said it was an internal team matter that had no input from the WICB.

There already is a document on team policy prepared by management prior to each series that comes up for revision when necessary, Skerritt said. The manager was wary about how the plan would be operated.

We have to be careful how we go with this, he said.

We have to ensure that it's positive and proactive and not negative. There is a fine balance between mental discipline and self-confidence.

We must not scare young players, who might already be scared of failure, into putting even more pressure on themselves. There must be the right balance.

Skerritt rejected the notion that the players were hurt most when they were hit in their pockets.

I'm sure that what hurts the players most when they fail is their pride, he said. They're professionals and it's their performance that matters.

And the ultimate penalty for poor performance, he added, lay not within the team but with the selectors who solely have the power to drop players.

Holford said the proposed action was certainly not the way to get the best out of players.

You're simply putting more pressure on them and asking for more dropped catches and bad shots.