Can Pollard play Test cricket?

If Viv Richards emerged from Antigua today, flaying boundaries all round the ground with insouciant ease, and chomping on his gum, would he be pigeonholed as a t20 player? It’s an interesting question to ask, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer.

Kieron Pollard is no Viv Richards, but he’s something. He has a little of the insouciance, a lot of the power (albeit with bigger bats and smaller boundaries) and perhaps even greater fielding ability. Add in some useful medium pace somewhere in the Angelo Mathews category that looks like it should be faster than it is, and you’ve got yourself a potent short form cricketer.

The next question though, is can he play Test cricket? That’s debatable. Look at his First-class stats and you say there’s no reason he can’t. In 24 games spread over six years, the last a year ago, he averages a respectable 38.40 in a West Indies regional setup where few average over forty.

What may end up being the problem is Pollard’s attitude towards getting into the Test team. If you read an interview with him from a couple of weeks ago he says that “I'm highly unlikely to play a full season of first-class cricket, so my only way of playing is by performing well in the ODIs.”

If you look at it from one angle, it makes sense, Pollard’s an international player, and the ODIs and T20s versus Ireland and England, along with the World T20 made it “highly unlikely” for him to play a full season of First-class cricket. It doesn’t mean he can’t play some though.

Some means more than two. That’s all he’s managed in the current Regional 4-Day Competition season. In those two, he managed scores of 4, 111, and 0. A fourth First-class hundred adds fuel to the fire, and adds to his case of playing Test cricket. But the IPL beckons, so he’s off, and won’t play First-class cricket for another year.

Why can’t he forgo the IPL for a year to play some county cricket? If he put feelers out there, I’m sure he could find a county to play for during at least part of the English summer. The point is, if he wants to play First-class cricket, he’s a good enough player, and well known enough to make it happen.

Twenty four First-class matches isn’t enough to play Test cricket. If he plays some regional cricket, a couple of months of the county season, that number could go up a fair bit. The weakness of the West Indies’ batting reserves is such that three or four more hundreds could secure him the number six spot with some haste.

He just needs to play those matches, and prove he can be a First-class cricketer. To make the Viv comparison again, the great man had played 44 First-class matches before he became a Test cricketer. At that point he had more runs at 2285, but at a lower average of 32.18, and one less hundred that Pollard has at this point.

Nobody’s suggesting Pollard could become anything near the great Viv, but a couple of thousand Test runs averaging around 35 to 40 batting at number six seems well within his grasp. If you add a bit of bowling, and great fielding to that, he doesn’t look a bad package to have coming in at six. If you compare him the current number six, from West Indies’ last Test in New Zealand, Narsingh Deonarine, he represents a significant potential increase. If only he’d make the effort.