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Journalism of Courage
Last year, when the West Indies stumbled to an innings-and-209-run defeat at Edgbaston, the legendary Curtly Ambrose, tore into them in his weekly column in The Daily Mail: “It has reached a point where it is very embarrassing.” The same day, Geoffrey Boycott, in his Daily Telegraph space, wrote: “This West Indies lot are the worst test match team I have seen in more than 50 years of watching, playing and commentating on cricket. They can’t bat and can’t bowl.”
A week later, the Caribbeans muted several of their critics with one of their most stinging performances this decade, chasing down 322 in Leed’s. They went on to lose the series, but there was hope brewing and blowing across the island. Series wins over Zimbabwe and Bangladesh assuaged the hope, even if they lost an away series in New Zealand and drew a home series to an equally-appalling Sri Lanka. There was anticipation, if only incremental, of a new dawn, which loomed in the build-up to this series.
Upon landing in India, their soon-to-depart coach Stuart Law blared “we’ve come here to fight.” After conceding 364 on the the first day of the Rajkot Test, fielding coach Nic Pothas forewarned that the Indian bowlers will be in for similarly long days.” But the performance of their team on the first two days ruthlessly exposed the flimsy mask. They were belted for 649 runs, three Indian batsmen smacked hundreds, two others scored between 80 and 100, and as if those weren’t embarrassing, they crumbled to 94/6 in only 29 overs.
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Alarmingly, the scoreline doesn’t hide anything—neither a devious track nor an inspired bowling attack, spitting one jaffa after the other. It was merely shoddy batting, without purpose or application, will or drive. It was merely capitulation; Indian bowlers just needed to land the ball and the tourists would contrive to perish.
Kraigg Brathwaite, their best batsman in the current set-up, was clueless to Mohammad Shami’s back-bender. True that the new ball jagged back viciously, but Brathwaite left in the wake of a feeble defensive push a sizeable gap between his bat and the body. Kieran Powell’s exaggerated shuffle did him in. Shai Hope played for Ravichandran Ashwin’s nonexistent turn. Sunil Ambris ran Shimron Hetmyer out farcically. He then tried to hit Ravindra Jadeja out of Khanderi and only managed an edge to the slips. Shane Dowrich was naive to Kuldeep Yadav’s trickery.
Not that the West Indies are unused to such shambolic submissions—seven times in their last 17 innings have they been folded out for less 200. One of them was against Sri Lanka in Bridgetown, packed up for a measly 93. Law has been continuously putting it down to inexperience, which could be true for their callow bowling attack in this series, but definitely not their batting. It was Brathwaite’s 50th Test; Powell has played 36 Tests, of which four were in India. Shai Hope and Roston Chase have garnered 22 appearances apiece. So clearly, they can’t limp away filing the unfamiliarity, inexperience excuse. It was sheer lack of Test-match grade.
Their ordinariness prompts pressing concerns, least of all pertaining to their longevity (and continuity) in Test cricket. Should a team like the West Indies, with their cream of players peddling white-ball cricket across the globe, be deemed eligible to play Test cricket with the top countries? Are such lop-sided contests an advertisement for the variegated thrills of Test cricket, at a time when Test cricket is facing an existential dilemma, what with talks of four-day cricket gathering impetus?
Their storied decline is a multilayered narrative, it has been talked about so long that the word itself has ceased to have much meaning. And it keeps getting worse, the defeatist spell has become over-long for sympathy. There’s no disputing that cricket will be poorer without them.
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Over the years they have created a splendid cricketing legacy, it would be dire if this was now extinguished. But at the same time, incompetency has been stretched to the outliers, it has been thus since the early aughts, and its gnawing at them like industrious termites.
It might not yet be opportune to rekindle the controversial two-tier Test argument, but the way forward could be them focussing merely on white-ball cricket, which, when they are at full pelt, are quite proficient at, and which is where their passion (even skill-sets) is. Lest, the embarrassment that made Ambrose cringe will only mount, and the Boycotts of the world will keep emitting the “can’t bat, can’t bowl” line. The Rajkot Test has so far been a blazing justification of their reflections.
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