Cricket West Indies (CWI) board member Dr Donovan Bennett says the decision to replace Andre Coley as Test team coach is less about his competence and more about his successor’s perceived capacity to get the region’s more talented players committed to red-ball cricket.

The 50-year-old former Jamaica wicketkeeper Coley, appointed Test team coach in 2023, is set to have his last series at the helm for the two-match tour of Pakistan in January 2025.

Daren Sammy, 40, the West Indies white-ball head coach and former two-time Twenty20 (T20) World Cup-winning captain, is to take over the red-ball team ahead of the three-Test home series against Australia in mid 2025.

“It does not in any way reflect on the competence of the person who was there before,” Bennett, who emphasised that he was expressing a personal view and not speaking on behalf of CWI, told the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday.

“I don’t think it’s a reflection of competence, I think it’s a reflection of… the thinking that Daren Sammy is the person who will be able to get all the players to respond to him.

“The feeling is that the players who he has under his arm — [given] his coaching and management — right now will probably be more amenable to committing themselves to Test cricket

“I think that is behind the [appointment] of Sammy… the fact that he more than anyone else will be able to transition players who are in the white-ball set-up into the red-ball set-up,” Bennett, also the Jamaica Cricket Association president, explained.

The former West Indies all-rounder Sammy, who was captain of the West Indies in all formats, has coached the T20 team to 20 victories in 35 matches since he took charge a year and a half ago. The One-Day International (ODI) side has won 15 of 28 matches in that time.

Despite recent improvement, the West Indies is ranked 10th in ODI cricket, while the T20 side is rated fourth.

The Test team has been without many of the Caribbean’s more talented players in recent years, predominantly because they have opted to compete in lucrative T20 and T10 franchise leagues. The West Indies Test team is ranked eighth in the world.

Coley’s finest achievement as Test coach came in Australia at the start of the year when West Indies stunned the highly-favoured hosts by eight runs in the second match at Brisbane to draw the series 1-1.

But series losses to India, England, and South Africa and the recent disappointing 1-1 result against visiting Bangladesh piled pressure on the Jamaican.

“We know our Test team has not been doing too well, and we have a very important and challenging series coming up against Australia, and of course, we need to be more competitive at the Test level than we have been in both the distant and recent past,” Bennett said.

He said cricket watchers could see major shifts in the make-up of the Test squad by the time the Australians visit the Caribbean.

“I would want to think that Daren Sammy is the man who is looked upon as the person who can motivate all the players across all the different formats of the game. Don’t be surprised if the next Test team that’s selected after the Pakistan series will have surprises.

“There are a lot of players who have been labelled — unfairly, I would think — as just white-ball players, and you’re probably going to see a lot of them crossing over to the red-ball team,” the Jamaican cricket boss noted.

Coley, who has coached at the West Indies academy and A team levels, had prior experience with the senior side, serving as assistant for a number of years, spanning tenures of men’s team head coaches Ottis Gibson, Phil Simmons, and Stuart Law.

Coley guided the West Indies Under-19 team at the 2010 World Cup, and at one stage had a role as assistant to Sherwin Campbell, the regional women’s team former head coach.

— Sanjay Myers