Marlon Samuels ... will depart for Australia this evening By Nodley Wright,
Staff Reporter
NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Jamaican batsman and off-spin bowler Marlon Samuels will leave the island this evening to replace injured middle-order batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul on the current West Indies' tour of Australia.
Guyanese Chanderpaul suffered a stress fracture in his left leg prior to the second Test in Perth and will require six weeks of rest and recuperation.
Samuels, who turns 20 next February, said he is viewing the call up as a great opportunity.
"I have been working towards it and the time has arrived and I will just put my best foot forward," said the former Kingston College player.
"It is the same feeling as when I joined the West Indies team for the One-Day tournament in Kenya. I feel good within myself knowing this is what I want to do and I am keeping my cool," added Samuels about the invitation.
Samuels, who played his first and last first-class game for Jamaica against Trinidad and Tobago in 1996 as a 15-year-old, said he was not surprised when he received the call on Sunday morning that providing he passed physical and medical tests he would be joining the West Indies squad in Australia.
"I was named as a reserve for the squad to tour Australia and coming from Kenya the management team was talking about this team as if most of the players would be making the tour.
"When I heard on Sunday that Chanderpaul was injured I knew there was a chance that my name would come up as I was a reserve," explained the six-footer.
"I believed that my chance would come. I knew, however, that I had to score runs and keep on scoring the runs and once I did that I knew it would come."
Having gotten what could turn out to be the chance of a lifetime, the player who represented Jamaica's senior team before making the Nortel Under-19 said he will be making the best use of it as it means a lot to him.
"It means a lot to me. I have been watching tapes of great players and from that one can almost feel the atmosphere and I want to be a part of that.
"My brother played for the West Indies and did not play for long and you can see that he is hurt not playing any longer. It (playing for the West Indies) calls for dedication and most of all, pride."
Already Samuels has been receiving advice from his older brother, Robert, once a West Indies representative.
"He said to me, 'be wary of every little thing. Keep in mind what you are going there to do. Nothing can stop you but yourself.'"
In two of his three seasons at the Nortel level, Samuels, who accumulates his runs in an attractive style, was selected to the West Indies Under-19 squad for youth World Cups. In 1997, his first year, the team went to South Africa and to Sri Lanka in 1999. In 1998 there was no World Cup but he was selected for a coaching seminar in Trinidad and Tobago.
