‘Playing for the West Indies comes first’

West Indies all-rounder Andre Russell has claimed that playing for the West Indies “comes first” for him, clearing the air about his absence from the T20 series in New Zealand recently while participating in the current Lanka Premier League.

Russell also revealed that having initially turned down the offer to tour New Zealand, he had tried to reverse his decision, but was told by head coach Roger Harper that it was “too late” as the team had already been chosen. However, Russell captured the headlines on the eve of the T20I series after Phil Simmons, the West Indies head coach, said it was “news” to him that Russell was playing for the Colombo Kings in the LPL.

In a chat this week with the Jamaica-based television network SportsMaxRussell reasoned expansively for the first time about his absence from the New Zealand tour. “Playing for the West Indies comes first for me,” Russell said in response to a query from Wayne Lewis, secretary of the West Indies Players Association, who is also an expert on SportsMax. “And the energy and effort that I put in playing for the West Indies, I wouldn’t do it playing anywhere else. Sometimes people don’t understand what a player like me goes through with problems and all that stuff. But they’re just going to judge, and it’s easy for them to judge, “he said.

‘Nothing was going my way. The pressure was real ‘

Russell acknowledged that when Harper contacted him in October while playing the IPL for the Kolkata Knight Riders, he had told both the head coach and the West Indies white ball captain, Kieron Pollard, that he was not in “space. head “adequate. with living in the bubble. Both players had bubbled from CPL to IPL between August and early November.

“The president came up to me while I was playing IPL, but before that, he was talking to Pollard,” he said. “And Pollard asked me and said, ‘Russ, I’m not forcing you, I’m just asking you,’ Are you coming to New Zealand? ‘ I said, “yeah man I’d like to come but right now Polly my mental space is messed up. I’m struggling, I have no careers, all of this.”

“I don’t want anyone to say that the next time Andre Russell wears the West Indies colors, he will be injured. I am smart in terms of how to handle my body.”

“As another player’s player, he will understand what I’m going through. Coming from a bubble in Trinidad [for CPL]come straight to Abu Dhabi [in IPL]From day to day, you can only go to practice and return to the hotel and your room. You can close your eyes and go to the bathroom, but there is nowhere else to go. “

Finally, Russell said that a combination of severe restrictions on movement in the bubble coupled with the hamstring injury during the IPL took a toll on his mindset and affected his form. “When the [Harper] came up to me, I told the president that my headspace was unclear. I changed my stance, I changed my technique, I changed my trigger movement, I changed all of these things just to score runs in IPL and nothing came my way. The pressure was real. I’m a tough player and I didn’t know that I could really feel what happened during this year’s IPL. And I just wanted everything to go fast behind me. “

Harper, in fact, gave Russell a little more time to make up his mind. “The [Harper] contacted me a couple of days later, when I played two games after that. We won one of them, we lost one, I fought in both games. At the end of the day, you can see the eyes of the team, you can feel energy. And as a great player, with the team depending on you and all that, it’s pressure. So I was saying no, I can’t go to New Zealand like this, I need to at least take a break from cricket, get out of the bubble after the IPL [to] Dubai, come out, relax a bit and clear my head. “