Quote:Shivnarine Chanderpaul was often pilloried for being too concerned about his average. Blackwood should begin to show more regard for his. Having scored one and five in the third test at Lords he averaged 37.4 for the series. Had he not thrown away his wicket at Leeds he would have averaged over 46.

Three innings during the subsequent tour of Zimbabwe yielded the Jamaican middle-order batsman a paltry nine runs. It could be argued that he was slightly unlucky to be stumped by a millimetre in the first innings of the first test, but for his second innings dismissal to be almost a carbon copy of the first, smacks of carelessness. A world-class batsman should not lose his wicket in that manner twice in the same game.

Always a forthright batsman, Blackwood has too often crossed the line over into recklessness. His favourite retort when challenged about being overly aggressive is to assert that he’s naturally an aggressive player. “That is just normally how I play ever since I started playing the game,” he remarked, after a blistering, though risky 62 against India at Sabina Park in June 2016. “So that’s my natural game. I try to score my first 20-25 runs quickly, and tried to use the pace of the ball. So that is how Jermaine Blackwood plays his game.”

What he said is accurate. I have been watching him since his days at Holmwood and that is how he has always played. But being naturally aggressive is one thing; being injudicious is quite another. A batsman should try to play his natural game as often as possible. There will be occasions, however, where circumstances and conditions require a modified approach. Australian opener David Warner, currently the most forthright test batsman in the game, recently lead his side to victory against Sri Lanka by scoring 123 runs off 234 balls. Normally, he’d have walloped more than 200 off that many deliveries.