Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 03, 2015 Sports
First Guyanese specialist opener since Ramdass in 2005 to play Test cricket
By Sean Devers
For 25 year-old right-hander opening batsman Rajendra Chandrika, today could be his most auspicious day of his life if he is selected in the final X1 for the West Indies as they face Australia in Dominica in the opening
game of a two-Test series.
The elegant batsman who hails from the East Coast village of Enterprise and plays at the domestic level for Everest played the first of his 32 First Class matches in 2010 against Trinidad & Tobago in the first ever Day/Night First-Class match in the West Indies.
Of those matches 29 were for Guyana, two for West Indies ‘A’ and the other for the President’s X1 against Australia. His First-Class debut was played with a pink ball and the slimly built opener made a polished half-century in his first innings at this level and is three runs short of registering 1,500 runs at an average of 25.81.
Chandrika said he was honored to have been called up and intends to make the most of his opportunity and make his many fans proud, especially those from Enterprise. If he plays today he will be the first person from that Village and the 49th from Guyana to play Test cricket. It will be his fourth First-Class match at the Windsor Park in Dominica.
He has been selected more for his tremendous talent, promise and consistency and not so much for his First-Class record since in five years of First-Class cricket he is yet to convert any of his eight fifties into a century.
His selection is due to dedication, talent, promise, flair and the general decline in the standard of batting over the last 25 years, which is Chandrika’s entire life span. It is much easier to make a West Indies team now as opposed to the glory days of West Indies cricket in the 1980s and early 90s when the almost invincible Caribbean team never lost a Test series in 15 years and won a record 11 consecutive Test matches from April to November 1984.
Chandrika has been especially consistent this season when he scored 525 runs from nine matches for Guyana and scored six half-centuries with arguably his most important one being his first innings 74 last week against the touring Australians playing for the President’s X1 in Antigua where he made his first-Class debut with an elegant 65, five years ago.
Chandrika, who spent some time at the Sagicor High Performance Centre in Barbados in 2010, knows how important his possible selection is today since due to the presence of the legendary pair of Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes in the 80s, prevented talented Guyanese openers like Sudesh Dhaniram and the late Andrew Lyght, the only Guyanese to score a hundred in Barbados not to play Test cricket, from making the Test team.
Clayton Lambert, who played the last of his five Test matches in 1998 in South Africa, was one of the most successful Guyana openers with 14 Regional tons but by time played his last match he was already 36 while Ryan Ramdass, who played his only Test in Sri Lanka in 2005 after scoring three Regional hundreds that year was the last specialist Guyana opener to play Test cricket.
Both Assad Fudadin and Leon Johnson are middle order batsmen who opened on a few occasions. Both have reached three-figures at First-Class level so Chandrika should know how lucky he is to have gained selection without a hundred to his name and should grasp this opportunity with both hands as the selectors desperately search for an opener to partner the young but highly responsible 22-year-old Kraigg Braithwaite who already has four Test hundreds including a double.
Chandrika first represented his country when he played as a 14-year-old in the Regional Under-15 competition. After scoring heavily for Guyana in the 2006 Regional Under-19 tournament he was selected for the West Indies U-19 side in the 2007 Senior Regional 50-over tournament.
He also played at the Regional U-19 level in 2007 scoring one century at this level from 10 games and was a member of Guyana’s winning team both years under Steven Jacobs’ Captaincy.
The Demerara opener played for the West Indies ‘A’ against Pakistan ‘A’ in two 50-over matches in the West Indies in November 2010 and in two First-Class matches against Bangladesh ‘A” in the West Indies the next year.
In September 2010 Chandrika represented Sagicor in a triangular 50-over series in Toronto, Canada, against Canada and Bermuda before touring with the Sagicor team in 2011 for a quadrangular 50- over series in Dubai which included the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan and the senior West Indies team. He scored a fluent 114 against Afghanistan.
But Chandrika, who was awarded the Most Improved Player’s trophy at the Sagicor High Perfomance Centre five years ago, should know that he has been selected on pure potential and he would hope to rectify that with a debut century in Dominica.
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Rajendra Chandrika was chosen as a test opening batsman for West Indies from Guyana? LOL! Hahahahahahaha. That is the sorry state of affairs of cricket in Guyana and for West Indies cricket. Rajendra Chandrika’s inclusion is in such contrast to players like Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Steve Camacho, Roy Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharran, Lance Gibbs and Colin Croft from Guyana. It is not Rajendra Chandrika’s fault that he was selected as a test opening batsman. He should not have been considered as an opening batsman even for a local club team. He is that bad as a cricket batsman. Even any tail ender bowler from West Indies would have scored more runs than Rajendra Chandrika has done by batting as an opener in the test innings.