Gus Logie should make a bold move and promote the experienced David Hemp to open Bermuda’s innings with veteran Clay Smith.

This is just one of the suggestions former Somerset Cup Match and Southampton Rangers bowler George (Friday) Bremar has urged the coach to consider doing in order to gain some sort of stability in the fragile batting order, which in practice matches has misfired and proved incapable of setting a decent foundation. According to Bremar, who regularly expresses his passionate views of cricket in this newspaper’s Sports Mailbox, Logie has to be practical and realise that with so many other opening combinations having failed, the only legitimate move left is to bank on Hemp’s vast experience gained from his many years in the English county game (where he now captains Glamorgan) and with other teams he has represented.

“Forget about Dean Minors, it’s to late to experiment with him as an opener, let’s leave it to Clay Smith and Hemp and wish for the best,” said Bremar. He felt Kwame Tucker wasn’t a good option as an opener either.

“I don’t like being picky but I think our selectors made a big mistake when they failed to invest in young Treadwell Gibbons Jr., who I believe should have been the one going to the World Cup as an opener,” Bremar said.

“They should have encouraged this fellow and given him a lot of intention and invested in him from the time they went to Ireland.

“But it’s crunch time now and too late to think what positive moves the selectors could have made, actually speaking they made so many blunders. But now we have to make the most of what we have down there and it’s a pity we still haven’t found the right batting combination after all this time.”

Bremar also said it was imperative to have Janeiro Tucker, Dean Minors and Lionel Cann batting closer together in the order.

Finding the right bowling combination was another puzzle that Logie had to resolve, Bremar suggesting that Kevin Hurdle had to take the new ball while he preferred to see young Stefan Kelly operating at the other end with either Malachi Jones or Saleem Mukuddem to follow ahead of spinners Dwayne (Sluggo) Leverock and Delyone Borden.

Bremar said now wasn’t the time to blast the Bermuda Cricket Board for poor selections but he reckoned that they could have been more practical when it came around to assembling squads in the build-up to the main competition. In his view there have been some awful choices made.

One area which they would have done proud is to have chosen seven of the best young players from the outset and stuck with them, claiming players between 17 and 19 years old would have had sufficient time to be groomed from the Ireland trip and travelled to the West Indies for the World Cup.

The ex-medium pacer said that if these youngsters would have been added he would have had no qualms about omitting Hemp and Clay Smith from the current squad — the latter in particular because of his obvious inability to shake off his many injuries.

“I recall the time when the West Indies won the World Cup 1975 when Sir Garfield Sobers had a slight groin injury and they brought in Rohan Kanhai to replace him and Kanhai got his last century in international cricket. Clay Smith should have been replaced by somebody who had no similar physical concerns,” he noted.