Cricket West Indies Director of Cricket Jimmy Adams has insisted on the development of a world-class Test cricket spinner would be a multi-tiered and complicated process.

While the Windies have produced top-quality spinners in the shortest format of the game, with the likes of Devendra Bishoo and Sunil Narine.  The fact that neither has really made the transition to the red-ball format, means it is another area that continues to be lacking for the team.

 In fact, it could be argued that the last West Indies world-class spinner to dominate Test cricket was Lance Gibbs who represented the team in the 60s and 70s.  Gibbs claimed 309 Test wickets.  Creating another player of Gibbs caliber, for Test cricket, is not a simple process.

“It’s a combination of quite a few things.  The first thing is to keep making sure that we encourage spin bowling throughout the region, but also to ensure that the environment in which they are developing their skill is one that can develop world-class slow bowling,” Adams told the Mason and Guest radio program.

In the West Indies regional tournaments, it is spinners that have dominated the bowling in recent years.  For at least the last five years a spinner has taken the most wickets in the WICB Regional 4-day tournament. The honour has been achieved by Rahkeem Cornwall, with Veerasammy Permaul and Nikita Miller achieving it twice.

“Good cricket wickets play a big role in player development, not just spinners but obviously it does for spinners as well.  The Indian spinners in the 90s proved that if you didn’t have wickets that got outside your region, you would struggle whenever you went outside the region,” he added.

“Also, though, we have to improve the quality of batting against spin bowling because spin bowlers also develop their craft by bowling to good batsmen.  You don’t want a spinner to see high-quality batting for the first time when they leave the region.”