After two losses in their first two matches in the 2021 ICC T20 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates, the West Indies team has come in for scathing criticism from former captain Sir Clive Lloyd and Prime Minister of St Vincent of the Grenadines Dr Ralph Gonsalves.

The West Indies lost their opening match to England by six wickets after being bowled out for 55 and then against South Africa, they lost by eight wickets after being restricted to 143-8. In both games, the West Indies inexplicably opted to leave out its most in-form batsman Roston Chase, the leading run scorer in the 2021 Hero CPL and who before Evin Lewis’s 56 against South Africa, the only batsman to score a half-century since the team arrived in Dubai.

Chase scored an unbeaten 54 against Afghanistan in the West Indies’ final warm-up match they took on England on October 23.

Lloyd, who captained the West Indies to ICC ODI World Cup titles in 1975 and 1979, said the defending T20 World Cup champions, do not seem to have a plan in place.

“Their planning seems to be all over the place and I think if you look at what has happened, 55 runs; no we are better than that,” said Lloyd while speaking on the Mason and Guest sports talk show in Barbados on Tuesday.

“Our planning seems to be terrible. We had a wonderful start [against South Africa] and we didn’t promote people in the proper order. You would expect the captain to come up when you are going at nine and over, to continue. You send (Nicholas) Pooran, who has not been playing well and you have (Shimron) Hetmyer who is batting quite well and making some very good scores. So, the batting order seems to be all over the place.

“Somewhere along the line we feel that this game is about hitting sixes, we are getting caught on the boundary; this is a big ground. “

Gonsalves weighed in on the performance of the team, calling for unity among the players.

“They can only come together if they begin to see themselves as part of an outfit as a team in solidarity with one another and with the community to whom they owe a profound obligation, and they are not acting in social solidarity, and they are not acting with one another as a team,” he said.

“We get these very annoying excuses which are really insulting to most of us who look to the community for sustenance, who look for solidarity to be uplifted and I am not getting that and it is painful.