Andre Coley says that while he is disappointed he wasn’t given a longer run as head coach of the West Indies Test team, he accepts that recent unfavourable results blighted his chances.
Cricket West Indies (CWI) announced on Monday that Coley’s tenure, which began in 2023, is to end with the two-Test tour of Pakistan in January 2025, months before his contract is set to expire in June.
Daren Sammy, the West Indies white-ball head coach and former two-time Twenty20 (T20) World Cup-winning captain, is to take over the red-ball team ahead of the three-Test home series against Australia in mid 2025.
The West Indies Test team — ranked eighth in the world — has been without many of the Caribbean’s more talented players in recent years, predominantly because they have opted to compete in lucrative T20 and T10 franchise leagues.
Under Coley’s guidance, an inexperienced West Indies team pulled off a stunning 1-1 result away to heavyweights Australia at the start of the year.
But series defeats to India, England and South Africa, and the recent disappointing 1-1 result against visiting Bangladesh mounted pressure on the former Jamaica wicketkeeper.
“I would have wanted to continue in the role but I’ll do whatever I need to do to get the boys motivated and ready for Pakistan,” Coley told the Jamaica Observer on Thursday, his first public comment on the impending coaching change.
“At this level it’s solely [about] performance; if coaches don’t do well it’s ultimately the coaches who are responsible.
“Being eighth on the table with two Test matches to go [in the Test Championship cycle] is ultimately not where we would want to be as a team and not where we had planned to be,” he said.
He noted the current core group of Test players has been a work in progress, something that should have weighed more heavily in the minds of the CWI decision makers.
“In our team, though, based on how we started in Australia there is always going to be an element of development because of the level of inexperience in the squad. From that standpoint, we needed to, I believe, take that into consideration… we had to give the players a bit more time to learn more,” the 50-year-old Coley said.
A reflective Coley said the result in Australia was the standout achievement of his head coaching stint.
“In terms of results that would have been a highlight — I don’t know if anything would have [surpassed] that, even if we had beaten England in England. And then because of the low expectation in the air at the time about the team going to Australia from people on the outside it was a really significant achievement by [Captain] Kraigg [Braithwaite] and the team,” he said, while explaining that the West Indies A team tour to South Africa at the end of 2023 provided a solid base for the successes in Australia.
Looking back on the Test series which followed the Australia tour, the West Indies coach said that while they were swept 0-3 in England, the 0-1 loss to South Africa and the draw with Bangladesh were more damaging.
“For different reasons there were disappointments against England, South Africa and Bangladesh, where results could have been different.
“Those series against South Africa and Bangladesh were the most disappointing, even though we had opportunities in England to win at least one of those Test matches too.
“The difference between where we are now in the [world ranking] table and where we should have been below [fifth-rated] New Zealand, that’s 140 runs because we lost by 40 runs to South Africa and just over 100 runs against Bangladesh in that second Test,” Coley reasoned.
Aside from coaching at the West Indies academy and A team levels, Coley had prior experience with the senior side, serving as assistant for a number of years, spanning tenures of men’s team head coaches Ottis Gibson, Phil Simmons and Stuart Law.
Coley guided the West Indies Under-19 team at the 2010 World Cup, and at one stage had a role as assistant to Sherwin Campbell, the regional women’s team’s former head coach. (Jamaica Observer)
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