Ray of Sunshine for West Indies Cricket

The Wall Street Journal

By Richard Lord

The West Indies will undoubtedly be the happier of the two sides following its 1-1 draw with England in the three-match Test series that finished in Bardados on Sunday. Both sides are in transition, and both are experiencing growing pains, but given the visitors’ higher expectations, England will be hurting more.

This was an entertaining, closely fought series despite pitches for the first two games, in Antigua and Grenada, that threatened to drain all life from it. The Barbados pitch, by contrast, produced fascinating cricket.

The West Indies Cricket Board, however, should take note that it was on that sporting Barbados pitch where the home team won its only Test. Overly placid pitches in domestic cricket have long hampered the development of West Indian players, widening the gap between the first-class and Test games. Which makes it astonishing that a team like England, with all the resources it has available at every level of the domestic and international game, can’t win a Test series there.

The visitors were well ahead in both first and third games but contrived to draw one and lose the other. In Antigua, they failed to take the five final West Indies wickets in two sessions, and in Barbados, they squandered a first-innings lead with a calamitous panic to 123 all out in the second.

The series has ended the England career of Jonathan Trott. His return to the side after stress forced him out of the most recent Ashes series 18 months ago was heartening, but he has now retired after his six innings yielded 72 runs, 59 of them coming in a single scratchy innings at Barbados.

Trott would probably have been dropped anyway, but sometimes it feels like it takes retirement to get out of this England team. England’s selection policy has been conservative for a decade or so now, following 20 years of radical inconsistency, which reliably led to bad results.

The selectors’ conservatism is to be applauded when it means sticking with a young player you believe in, but not so much when it involves a refusal to accept that yesterday’s solution no longer works, blocking young players from the side. And so Trott’s likely replacement, Yorkshire opening batsman Adam Lyth, will presumably be thrown in against the frightening skills of Trent Boult and Tim Southee in England’s forthcoming two-Test series against New Zealand. His second engagement would be against the likes of Mitchell Johnson, Mitchell Starc and Ryan Harris of Australia.

While England’s batting lost the third game of the West Indies series, it’s still the team’s stronger suit right now. Captain Alastair Cook has rediscovered his confidence outside off stump, and has followed five 50s with a century, his first in Tests for almost two years, as a result. Jos Buttler and Ben Stokes might have managed modest scores but look like the future. And Joe Root (358 runs at an average of 89.50) and Gary Ballance (331 at 66.20) increasingly look like the present. Ian Bell, meanwhile, has been in modest, inconsistent form, but that often happens, and he has roared back in the past.

Perhaps more worrying is the form of Moeen Ali, with both bat and ball. His recent injury layoff and consequent lack of bowling are one likely reason, but he also failed to fully adjust to the different length required on the slower pitches of the Caribbean, something he will need to do if he’s to cement his role as England’s premier Test spinner. Those are, after all, the conditions that predominate across Asia.

England’s win at Grenada was largely the result of James Anderson’s bowling on the final day, and the team’s seam attack has become worryingly reliant on the man who in that game became England’s highest-ever Test wicket-taker. Anderson took 17 wickets at 18 in the series. Apart from James Tredwell in his one Test, no other England bowler averaged less than 32. In particular, Stuart Broad’s form seems to be on a gradual but inevitable downward trajectory.

The new England and Wales Cricket Board chairman Colin Graves said before the series that only victory was acceptable, which means coach Peter Moores must be checking his phone nervously. His heir presumptive, former Australian international Jason Gillespie, is also available, having just turned down the chance to coach South Australia in favor of staying at Yorkshire. Specifically, Graves described West Indies as “mediocre” opposition, which looks a less fair assessment now than it did then.

West Indies’ progress in the series has largely come in its batting. It collapsed in Barbados, but held on with grit in Antigua and counter-punched its way back into a game it was losing in Barbados. It did so without a major contribution from Shivnarine Chanderpaul, its batting mainstay for most of the past decade.

Part of the reason Chanderpaul hasn’t already retired as he approaches 41, has been the lack of middle-order alternatives. His slump could hasten his departure, but so could the emergence of some promising young batsmen.

Chief among them is Jermaine Blackwood, with 311 series runs at 77.75 and fine contributions at both Antigua and Barbados. But this was a rounded West Indies batting performance. While Blackwood was the only front-line batsman to average more than 40 in the series, four others averaged in the 30s, and every member of the team’s top eight made at least one important contribution.

That includes No. 8 batsman and first-Test centurion Jason Holder, who is becoming quite a proposition —accurate and bouncy with the ball, and capable of combining solid defense with decisive attacking shots.

The bowling star was Jerome Taylor, with 11 series wickets from two games at 18.27. Like England with Anderson, however, West Indies puts too much burden on the fragile quick, and lost the second Test when he was missing through injury. Kemar Roach, for several years one of the best seamers in world cricket, with 118 wickets at 27.12 from his 31 games, looks badly diminished by injury, but Shannon Gabriel looked solid and, bowling at about 145 kilometers (90 miles) an hour, is genuinely sharp.

England’s pre-Ashes series against New Zealand must have looked a nice easy warm-up when it was arranged, but with a resurgent New Zealand side romping around the World Cup, gleefully smashing anything that came within reach, it looks a lot more challenging now.

Similarly West Indies, which plays two Tests against Australia in June in Dominica and Jamaica, looks like it may provide slightly stiffer pre-Ashes competition than previously thought. But neither West Indies nor England will be looking forward to the Aussies’ visit with anything other than a deep sense of foreboding.

These may be largely young, transitional teams, but the marauding, ultra-positive Australians have a bowling lineup that will exploit any opposition frailties.