The hosts’ pace attack, with a combined experience of 31 Tests and 56 wickets, is a candidate for being their weakest ever, yet India cannot simply show up and expect to win
Karthik Krishnaswamy in Antigua20-Jul-20161:55
‘We’re expecting a bit of grass cover’ – Bangar
There are 15 champions in Dwayne Bravo’s . Four are cricketers. None are current members of West Indies’ Test team. Even little brother Darren finds no mention in the song.West Indies have won three ICC tournaments this year. Under-19 World Cup? Champions. Women’s World T20? Champions. Men’s World T20? Champions. But they haven’t won a Test series against anyone other than Bangladesh or Zimbabwe, home or away, since August 2012.West Indies’ most recent Test series ended in January. They lost 2-0, and, but for rain, could have lost 3-0. In that series, Australia ran up totals of 583 for 4 declared in Hobart, 551 for 3 declared and 179 for 3 declared in Melbourne, and 176 for 2 declared in rain-ravaged Sydney. They scored their runs at 4.67 runs per over.Champions, West Indies’ bowlers definitely were not.Simmons hopes to build on recent gains
Phil Simmons, the West Indies coach, has said the absence of four back-to-back Tests in their calendar in recent times could make it hard for his team against a formidable Indian side.
“Whether they think they are well prepared or not, they are one of the most dangerous sides in the world,” he said. “Their batting line-up alone tells you that they’re dangerous side and that it’s going to be a hard series. We haven’t played four Tests back-to-back in a long time, so that too is going to make it even harder. But we’re going to try to do our best in every Test match.”
Simmons brushed aside talk of “building a team for the future”, insisting the team was focused on the present instead.
“It’s not just about the future. It’s about now and how we play now. Every series is significant. I think it’s a case where we want to continue winning – we won the last Test match we played in the Caribbean against England, and then we had a couple of Test matches against Australia in which we didn’t do well, we went to Australia, so now we want to just try and build on what we’d been trying to do in Australia, the last two Test matches in Australia were not as bad as how we started, so we’re looking to build on that.”
Above the dressing rooms at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua runs a strip of sans-serif capital letters. Sir Andy Roberts End, it says. At the opposite side of the ground, above the press box, is another strip of capital letters. Sir Curtly Ambrose End.Between them, those two took 607 wickets in 145 Tests at a combined average of 22.53, with 33 five-wicket hauls and five ten-wicket match hauls.On Thursday, when West Indies begin a four-Test home series against India, their squad will contain four fast bowlers with a total of 56 wickets in 31 Tests at a combined average of 40.39, and not a single five-wicket haul.West Indies have lost Jerome Taylor to Test retirement, and have ignored Kemar Roach. While both were abject in Australia – they combined for two wickets an average of 252.00, and gave away 5.79 runs per over – no team can easily replace a new-ball pair with 252 wickets and the experience of 83 Tests, even a pair as capricious, frustrating and injury-prone as Taylor and Roach.Fast bowlers win or lose Test matches, and West Indies enter their latest home season with a pace attack that is a candidate for being their weakest ever: Carlos Brathwaite, Shannon Gabriel, Jason Holder and Miguel Cummins.It isn’t as if West Indies don’t have other issues. They have dropped a wicketkeeper-batsman with 74 Tests behind him, and – Kraigg Brathwaite and Darren Bravo aside – have a top order full of question marks, the biggest among them hanging over the head of Marlon Samuels, who has been on a sensational run of limited-overs form of late, but hasn’t passed 20 once in his last nine Test innings.But it is the bowling that will worry them the most, coming up as it will against the quality of India’s batting line-up and pitches that are likely to be slow and demand long spells of sustained pressure. In recent times, West Indies’ bowlers have not been particularly good at delivering those kinds of spells.”One of the words that we’re going to harp on a lot is how patient we are, because we tend to get bored of bowling [at] one place and doing well and not getting wickets, so we try something [else],” their head coach Phil Simmons said on Tuesday. “So we’re going to harp on this, trying to be patient and do the things that we’re doing well, continuously, so that we get the wickets, and same thing with batting. You bat long and you stick around, you work hard and you’ll get the just reward at the end.”Two days before the first Test, the West Indies team management tried to hammer this point home in the design of their net session. The quick bowlers’ net had an extra stump in it, nailed down on a fifth-stump line a couple of feet behind the wicket. Right through the net session, the only thing the fast bowlers attempted to do was bowl in the channel outside off stump, and the batsmen facing them tried to leave as many balls as they could. The wall of netting behind the batsmen shook violently, again and again and again. Every now and then, the fifth stump went for a spin.The effort was real, and palpable, but translating that sort of discipline into an actual match environment is a challenge of an entirely different magnitude. It will only take one bad session to remind West Indies that they are the eighth-best Test team of the nine that make up the rankings, and that they occupy that lowly spot at a time when there is talk of splitting Test cricket into two tiers.These are not good times for West Indies Test cricket, and the road uphill is steep.For all that, India cannot simply show up and expect to win. They won their last two Test series in the Caribbean, in 2006 and 2011, but only by 1-0 margins, and both those series reinforced their long-held status as a team that has always struggled away from home, seldom asserting their dominance even against weaker opposition. The last Test match they played in these islands, in Dominica, summed it up perfectly: the captains shook hands and agreed to a draw when India needed 86 runs to win, in 15 overs, with seven wickets in hand. India were content with a 1-0 win.”India,” began ESPNcricinfo’s final-day report of the Test match, “will have to wait until 2016 to win more than one Test in a series in the Caribbean – a feat they’ve never achieved.”India’s Test captain Virat Kohli, still fairly new at his job, is an ambitious man. So is their new head coach. They will want a series win, first and foremost, regardless of the margin, but they have surely set their sights a little higher than that.
