Joel Garner believes the West Indies players don't work hard enough

Joel Garner feels West Indies junior players are getting more attracted to T20 games than Test cricket

Former West Indies cricketer and current team manager Joel Garner, who is also known as “Big Joel” or “Big Bird” stated that the West Indies players are not working hard enough.

As quoted by ESPNCricinfo, in an interaction with the media, the former fast bowler said, “We've always had promising players, we've always had attractive players, the problems we have is that, most of the players are identified, I don't think they work hard enough, and they fall away.” Garner added, “I think that if the players are prepared to work as hard as they need to work, they can get to the top of world cricket as well."

Garner was asked about the weak points of the West Indies team with reference to the ongoing Test series against India and said, "I think that the longer they spend in the middle, the easier the batting becomes.

"And I think that is one area that I'd like to see improve, where you'd like to see the fellows batting long, not only batting long but batting effectively.”

The former cricketer added that partnerships are important for any cricket game and that is what saved the game in Jamaica. Garner even said that without good partnerships, the performance of the team cannot be good enough.

Garner also said that the team is quite challenging up to the under-19s but the attractions of the T20 games are hampering West Indies younger players’ performance in Test cricket. The former cricketer also questioned the mentality of the players and the choices they make when selecting which version of the sport they play.

The former fast bowling great said, “I think everybody looks at the T20 cricket and they want to play the T20 format of the game as opposed to playing the longer version of the game, and, you know, it is a matter of choice. Why work for five days if you can work for three hours? I think that that's the mentality and it's something that we've got to try and change in terms of how our players look at the cricket and the type of cricket our players want to play."

Gerner later clarified that he did not mean to discourage the players from playing T20s but he expressed his thoughts that the revenues earned through T20 games should be invested in Test cricket.