West Indies begin World Cup preparations

Anxious to field a competitive outfit for the 2007 World Cup, the West Indies board has announced that it plans to have a short list of 30 players by September this year, who will be put through special training for the event. A report in The Jamaica Observer states that Teddy Griffith, the president of the WICB, has asked the selection panel to look out for players who could feature in the 30-man squad.

"They [the players short-listed] will be engaged in their cricket, but they would also be involved in a programme using the facilities at the St George's University in Grenada and the University of the West Indies in Barbados," Griffith said on a cricket discussion on CBC-TV. "Granted there may be people who may drop out and other people [may come] in, but [we] want to get this done by the time the team returns from the Champions Trophy in England in September." West Indies will feature in another one-day competition before that, when they battle it out with England and New Zealand in the NatWest Series tournament later this month.

West Indies have recently struggled in both forms of the game. Though they beat Bangladesh 3-0 in the one-dayers, a couple of games could easily have gone the other way. Before that series, they were thrashed by England in the Tests, but made a better fist of it in the ODIs, holding them to a 2-2 draw in a rain-affected series.

Griffith also clarified that no foreign team would be invited for this season's Carib Beer Cup, West Indies' domestic four-day tournament. Overseas teams have been playing in the competition for the last four years - A teams from England, Bangladesh and India participated, as did Kenya's national team - but Griffith ruled out another invitation next season.

"First of all, it's very expensive to bring foreign teams for our first-class competition and so if we are going to have them they must be of the best quality," he said. "In the first year, England came and that was marginally successful, but certainly with the other teams it was not so."