West Indies’ coach Ottis Gibson is not fazed by criticism of his tenure with the regional cricket team.
Since taking up the job in 2010, Gibson has endured mixed fortunes in all three formats.
The team won the World Twenty20 in 2012 but have lost four of their last five Tests after earning six consecutive victories.
The record has resulted in the removal of Darren Sammy as Test captain after he lost the job as One-Day skipper.
“Critics are critics and it is their right to criticise but every day we go out on the field and we try and do the job the best way that we can to get the team moving,” Gibson said in a recent interview with NATION?SPORT during the training camp at the 3Ws Oval ahead of this month’s three-Test series against?New Zealand.
“Any team, whether it is a great team or a team in transition like ourselves, or a team that is trying to develop like we are, will have our ups and downs.
“When we won the six Test matches in a row, I guess those critics would’ve been looking at the opposition that we played against and said well, we can’t really judge it on that opposition. Then we had the four losses, they look at the opposition again, playing away from home in India and New Zealand which have always been tough places to play, and they would’ve had a lot more to say.
Gibson said the directors of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) would at some point, review everything he had done and make a decision on his future involvement with the team.
“They will decide whether it is time for Gibson to move on and then Gibson will move on and the cricket will still continue,” he said.
But whenever that time comes, Gibson said he hoped the team would be better off than when he first took the job.
“The one thing that I always wanted to do from the beginning was to try and develop a winning team. There are certain characteristics of a winning team in terms of fitness, in terms of attitude, attention to detail and striving for excellence.
“We have had that in part. We have not had it all the time and that’s why we have not been a winning team all the time. We have won some, we have lost some. We won a World Cup. We won six Test matches in a row and ultimately, when I move on, I would like to think that the team and the cricket is in a better place than when I got my hands on it,” he said.
With the first Test starting on Sunday at Sabina Park in Jamaica, Gibson reckons the team’s bowling is now much stronger now with both Jerome Taylor and Kemar Roach returning and Shannon Gabriel showing signs of improvement.
“We also got Shane [Shillingford], who has probably been one of the best spinners in Test cricket in the last [year] and [Sunil] Narine, who present mystery, so we got five bowlers there, who are more than capable of bowling out any team in the world.
Narine has since been ruled out of the series after failing to meet the WICB’s deadline for attending the camp.
“It is just getting our batsmen to put the runs on the board for those guys to operate and if we can get some consistency with the bat, we know that we got a bowling attack that can take 20 wickets,” he said.
