Is there a soul alive with an ounce of love for cricket who did not rejoice at the way the first Test in Bridgetown turned out? Even the ranks of the Garrick Club could scarce forbear to cheer the sight of a team assembled under the banner of West Indies playing as if the maroon caps meant more to them than the gold necklaces. By finding two different ways to humiliate England with the ball in the space of a single match, they achieved something not even the greatest of their legendary predecessors could manage.
In the first innings at the Kensington Oval the pace quartet of Kemar Roach, Shannon Gabriel, Jason Holder and Alzarri Joseph took all 10 wickets between them as England calypso-collapsoed to 77 all out, with Roach’s five for 17 the pick of the bunch. Two days later it was Roston Chase, whose batting is the stronger element of his all-round talents, stepping up to flight his barely turning off-breaks through the defences of eight Englishmen while conceding 60 runs out of a total of 246.
All of this brought memories rushing back, most immediately of the great Caribbean pace attacks. Those of us who saw Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith steaming in under the captaincies of Frank Worrell and Garry Sobers will never forget the sight of that intimidating muscularity. But in the following decade the threat was redoubled with the creation of the four-man unit: Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, and Colin Croft or Malcolm Marshall, whose relentless barrage of fireballs, varied in trajectory but not intensity, gave opposing batsmen no relief.
On and off the field those fast bowlers had a presence that even retirement cannot diminish. One day during the Jamaican leg of England’s 1993-94 tour there was a now-forgotten reason to spend a few off-duty hours in the pavilion at the Melbourne Cricket Club in Kingston, founded a hundred years earlier for men “of modest means”. A local league match was in progress. Suddenly the doors opened. Silhouetted against the light were the figures of Holding – who had begun his career there – and Roberts. It was several years since either man had last played Test cricket, but the effect was undimmed. Had it been Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday coming through the swing doors of a saloon in Tombstone, Arizona in the 1880s, or Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker entering a 52nd Street club together in the late 1940s, the spine could not have experienced a more electrifying tingle.
Roach and his colleagues lived up to that tradition on Thursday, succeeding without recourse to the near-sadistic physical aggression that characterised historic assaults on the sturdier defences of Brian Close, Geoff Boycott and Mike Atherton. On a pitch that was starting to offer them the encouragement their England counterparts had been unable to find the previous day, they performed with collective discipline as well as spirit.
In some ways Chase’s performance was even more remarkable. Back in 1950, Alf Valentine opened a series in England by taking eight for 104 at Old Trafford, and 12 years later Lance Gibbs’s eight for 38 at Bridgetown gave West Indies the third win in a five-match clean sweep against India. Valentine, his pal Sonny Ramadhin and Gibbs were indisputably great spin bowlers, but who followed them? It would be hard to make a claim for inclusion in that category on behalf of Roger Harper, Carl Hooper, Jimmy Adams, Dinanath Ramnarine, Sulieman Benn or Devendra Bishoo, despite the last-named’s eight for 49 against Pakistan in 2016. Chase might never again come close to his figures on Saturday, but the statistics put his feat into perspective.
Perhaps Boycott’s characterisation of West Indies as “very ordinary, average cricketers” in his newspaper column on the eve of the match had something to do with the way they rose to the occasion. You’d almost like to think so. His words were as witlessly provocative as Tony Greig’s promise to make Clive Lloyd’s team “grovel” before the 1976 series defeat, or the assessment of Denesh Ramdin’s 2015 team as “mediocre” by Colin Graves, the ECB chairman, in the lead-up to a series that ended all-square.
Be that as it may, the result in Bridgetown will bring a light to the eye of anyone who thinks a strong and successful West Indies team is important to the overall health of Test cricket. As the sessions rolled by and their grip tightened, it became easier to ignore the crowd shots on TV, which suggested that the crowd at the Kensington Oval was almost entirely white and British, and that the hosts’ success was being achieved despite rather than because of the way the game is being run in the Caribbean.
The identity built up during the decades of success makes West Indies unique and precious. The same could be said of Brazil’s football teams, who will play for ever more in the benign glow cast by the World Cup winners of 1958, 1962 and 1970 and whose occasional falls from grace – like the traumatic 7-1 thrashing by Germany five years ago – inflict a widely shared pain. Or of Ferrari, the only ever-present team in 68 seasons of the Formula One championship, who have endured long periods without success but whose global popularity, forged in the days of blood and glory, has survived into a very different era.
The England dressing room might not think so, but there is an upside to the hammering they took last week. By enabling West Indies to reassert themselves as a power in five-day cricket, they set up the series as a trial of character and approach for both sides. Most of all, though, they did the whole game a favour.
