Tony Becca

Brian Lara must be getting tired of making excuses after every match and of talking about why the West Indies can win the match and what they need to do to win the match before each match.

With the West Indies' habit of batting well, or bowling well, or fielding well in a match and of hardly ever getting two out of the three correct, captain Lara always seems to find himself making excuses for the players after they have lost a game. He must be getting tired of that - just as he must be getting tired of asking them, before every match, to improve on what they did wrong the last time.

In the second one-day match against Pakistan, the West Indies, after a disappointing batting performance, bowled and fielded well. In the third match, however, after Lara had lamented their batting performance, had praised their bowling and fielding to the extent that he said the West Indies now possessed a world-class bowling attack and begged them to improve on their batting, the West Indies went out and failed in all three departments of the game.

Hope for the best

After losing the second match in Faislabad by two wickets with 10 deliveries to spare, and with Pakistan having seven wickets in hand at the end, the third in Lahore with eight deliveries to spare, the West Indies, trailing 2-0 in the five-match contest, go to Multan tomorrow, tonight local time, for match number four - for the match they must win in order to have a chance of sharing the series, and Lara must be lost for words.

Unless he is the perennial optimist, unless he believes that as the captain he has to say something and since he has to say something he must say something that will not demotivate the players.

First of all, even with Younis Khan and Mohammed Yousuf out and Inzamam ul-Haq doubtful, Pakistan may be without their three top batsmen, Lara has to hope that Shivnarine Chanderpaul is fit and ready to play, that Chris Gayle can bat for at least an hour, and that he will score some runs.

Secondly, Lara will have to hope that pacers Jerome Taylor, Ian Bradshaw and Corey Collymore can dismiss Pakistan cheaply, and thirdly, Lara has to hope that his fielders come good on the ground and in the air.

The West Indies, for example, cannot afford another mistake like Daren Ganga's when, after a mix-up between Mohammed Hafeez and Imran Farhat left the two batsmen at one end of the pitch, he failed to complete a run-out in the first over of Pakistan's innings in the last match. That was so easy that it was embarrassing.

The West Indies, however, can do more than hope. They can select a better team.

Remembering that one-day games last for only 50 overs, they need not select seven batsmen plus the wicketkeeper, and remembering that, one-day or not, the easiest way to win a cricket match is to dismiss the opposing team, they need to select more than three specialist bowlers.

The West Indies' tendency of selecting three specialist bowlers and a few batsmen who can bowl cannot be good, and it cannot be good for a few reasons.

It cannot be good because six batsmen, with the help of the other five players at times, should be able to bat for 50 overs; it cannot be good because most times the West Indies pack the batting, the batting fails; it cannot be good because if the top batsmen come off, as one would expect most of them to do most of the time, the others are usually wasted; and it cannot be good because, but for an occasion here and there when the part-timers bowl reasonably well, most times the opposing batsmen just wait for them to come off and go at the part-timers.

Mohammed's time

With three specialist pace bowlers and an all-rounder who is a pacer, one of those four bowlers should be a spin bowler and right now it should be left-arm wrist-spinner Dave Mohammed - a man who, as a spin bowler, must be better than Gayle, Samuels and Ramnaresh Sarwan, a man who as a batsman at number eight has scored more runs in recent times than all those batsmen who have been selected to bat at number seven and number eight and to help out as bowlers and a man who as a fielder is more dependable than most of the batsmen and the bowlers in the team.