Lack of mental strength hurting West Indies, says Ottis Gibson

West Indies head coach Ottis Gibson has admitted that his side is losing mental battle against England in the ongoing Test series. The Poms beat the Windies by nine wickets in the second Test to take an unassailable 2-0 lead
in the series.

The Caribbean Kings played superbly in patches, but failed to add the winning touch in both games. Gibson stated that while there were plenty of technical flaws, it was lack of mental strength that prevented the Windies from
putting England under pressure.

"At Lord’s, (Adrian) Barath played really well. (Jimmy) Anderson is a world class swing bowler, when the ball is swinging he’s probably the best in the world at it. Barath played really well to get through two hours of him (at
Lord’s) and then straight after lunch played at a ball outside off-stump that he would have left in that first two hours," he said.

"So it’s not a technical thing. It’s being able to repeat your skill over and over again and that’s what the top teams in the world do: they test your technique, they test your character, they test your mental strength and that’s
perhaps where we’re falling short. They are doing the hard work but they’re not doing it for long enough," he added.

In the Trent Bridge Test, the West Indians batted well to score 370 runs in the first innings after losing first six wickets for only 136. The Kings also bowled well to restrict the Englishmen to 428.

After doing a wonderful job in the first innings, the tourists lost their rhythm and performed poorly in the second innings. Apart from Marlon Samuels, no batsman could do anything special and as a result, the entire side collapsed
on 165.

"We’ve got a good week off to go back and reflect on where we are at the moment and what we can salvage out from the rest of the series with one Test match to go and look at all the different options that we have available and
that is certainly one of them: maybe moving Marlon to (number three) or Darren," Gibson told reporters.

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Posted by Rana Nasir Ghafoor on May 31 2012. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry