Super 8 - bye bye windies

Still 7 more matches left to be played in an extremely lengthy Super 8 phase but by and large the semi-finalist have been determined. Well at least 3 of the four have been anyways.

New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka look set to be in the semi finals while South Africa and England battle for the 4th spot.

What about the West Indies you say? Well 4 losses in 4 Super 8 matches have left the home side one from the bottom in the points table. Even supposed minnows Bangladesh appear to be playing better than the Windies at the moment.

So well what can one say about the Windies side who came through their preliminary round unbeaten only to be trashed soundly by superior teams in the Super 8? Well I can make some excuses here:

• We got a bad schedule and ended up playing games against Australia and New Zealand back to back.
• The squad wasn't prepared.
• Big Questions about captaincy or rather the captaincy was poor
• Definitely a lack of strategy was shown in things like taking the power play late in the game against South Africa to not even attempting to slog until too late will watching the run rate skyrocket as we chased a total against New Zealand.
• The team has deficiencies in both its batting and bowling departments.
• We should have batted first vs South Africa
• Questions about squad and team make up like why replace an opening bowling with a batsman who will bat at number 8?

and the list could go on and on.

I just think the team was under prepared and just isn't as good as we would all have liked to think. Talent and potential wise maybe we are up there but performance wise lately we have been playing at or below the minnow level. Why? Well for one the effort given by the team is definitely lagging.

No wonder its reported that a gun was pulled on certain Windies players at a nightclub last week. That fan was probably just as disgusted as most fans are by the lackadaisical approach by our squad not even making the last four games competitive.

Where do we go from here? Well the team goes home after the Super 8. Oh wait they are home so I guess they just go their separate ways and enjoy the money they made while losing. In terms of rebuilding, fans have heard the same mantra chanted by the board and the players for over 10 years now. Instead of rebuilding we seem to be digging a deeper and deeper hole. Hopefully at some point the players and management and WICB will take responsibility for their roles and the Windies can actually become competitive again but for now I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. We're just not a good team. A so it go I guess!