BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC):

New regional cricket boss Julian Hunte has pledged his board's full support for the West Indies team and says they will be given everything necessary to succeed.

"As long as I am there, the board is going to do everything possible to ensure that they have the tools to do the job, so there can't be any more excuses [for failure]," Hunte said in an interview with leading cricket commentator Tony Cozier, carried in his column in the Sunday Sun newspaper here.

"When I saw their performances in the two warm-up matches [for the Twenty20 World Cup], especially when they beat New Zealand, the fielding, (Daren) Powell's tremendous spell (4-3-1-4), the sensible batting, I really felt they could win the tournament.

"But then we had all those wides and dropped catches in the opening match against South Africa. It showed up the inconsistency."

West Indies exited the tournament in the preliminary round after losing to hosts South Africa and minnows Bangladesh.

The disappointment represented yet another failure by the West Indies after their wretched performance in the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean earlier this year.

Hunte, who recently took over from Trinidadian businessman Ken Gordon as West Indies Cricket Board president, said he was hoping to improve the relationship between the players and the board.

Difficult to understand

"I found it difficult to understand why the players were in the north pole and the board in the south. It just didn't make sense," Hunte said.

"One of the objectives has been to get across, once and for all, that the board and the players constitute a partnership.

"What I've been trying to do is to get to know these guys, to hear whatever complaints they might have, whatever suggestions they want to make. I felt on this visit [to South Africa] what I had to do was to establish a relationship that I can build on.

"I got the impression that sometimes those guys felt they were out there on their own, that they were playing but nobody cared."