Hard-hitting reality of Windies’ batting points to inevitable English rout
You’ll have to go all the way back to December 3, 2013, to find the last instance of the West Indies scoring over 500 runs in a single innings of a Test match.
Or, to put it into context, the last time Windies scored over 500 runs in a Test match, Jason Holder was a 22-year-old with no Test caps, Darren Sammy was still their captain across all formats, Jofra Archer was an 18-year-old kid still hopeful of representing West Indies in the 2014 and 2016 editions of the Under-19 World Cup and Darren Bravo was legitimately believed to be the next Brian Charles Lara. Since then, 2402 days have passed, Leicester City and Liverpool have won the Premier League, Donald Trump has become the President of the United States and West Indies, themselves, have won two T20 World Cups.
Yet one thing has remained constant all the while: the Windies’ batting in the longest format has continued to be as weak and fragile as a glass bauble rolling around in a bear trap. And come Thursday, July 8, when the Men from the Caribbean lock horns with England at The Ageas Bowl in what will be a historic day for cricket, their misery with the bat looks all set to prolongate. Or, at least, that is what their intra-squad warm-up match suggests.
If you’re a fan excited by the prospect of the Windies ‘taking the Englishmen on’ in the forthcoming three-Test series, chances are that you would have paid very little - if any - attention to their batting. And there’s a very good reason for the same. Over the course of the last 24 months, the Windies bowlers have done such an extraordinary job that they’ve ended up completely hogging the limelight - and it’s only fair that they have done so. However, their fame has come at a cost. The proficiency of the Windies pacers has ended up driving the microscopes away from the batsmen and what it has essentially done is mask the inadequacies and the ineptness of the men who are responsible to get the runs on the board. While West Indies' bowling has been on the rise, their batting, however, has gone for a toss; it has proportionately degraded at an alarming rate. And if we were, even for a moment, to think that by a miracle or god’s grace it would come good in a week’s time against England, then I’m afraid that we couldn’t stray further from reality.
Dating back to January 1, 2017, in the last 25 Tests they’ve played, the Windies batsmen have managed to score over 400 in their first innings just four times - one of which was against Zimbabwe - while on the contrary, they’ve been bowled out under 250 a staggering 13 times. In the said time frame, they’ve averaged a meagre 213 in the first innings of away matches against teams not named Zimbabwe. Overall, their average first innings total in their last 10 outings has been a preposterous 221.4; on six of the ten aforementioned occasions, they were bowled out under 250.
When exposed to quality sides or when put in the line of fire in alien conditions the Windies batsmen have crumbled and failed without putting up a fight - and have done so miserably. Of the 9 Test wins the Windies have registered in since 2017, only five have come against one of the Top seven countries in the world and their unlikely win at Headingley in 2017 stands as the only away win from the lot. In each of the remaining 14 games they lost, they averaged a dismal 194 runs in the first innings and that average drops further to just 186 when you take just the away matches into account (the 186 is elevated by a 311 against India in Hyderabad in 2018, minus which the average further plummets to 169).
The most frustrating, irksome thing, however, about the no-show of their batsmen has been the fact that in the very same matches, the bowlers have busted their backsides off and have averaged a remarkable 29.05 across the last 25 Tests; compare that to the hideous 23.47 that their batsmen, in contrast, have put up. The two-Test series the Windies had against the Indians at home presents a very good case for how their batsmen have, time and again, inexcusably and unforgivably let the team down. In each of the two Tests where they bowled first, the Windies bowlers bowled the Indians out for 416 and 297 respectively, yet went on to lose those games by a margin of 257 and 318 runs; the batsmen averaged a dismal 162.25 across the whole series.
The most alarming statistic of all, for the team, however, must arguably be the fact that statistically, their best batsmen across the last three years in Test cricket has been Jason Holder, who has scored his 1097 runs at an average of 36.56. Barring Holder, only four batsmen - Roston Chase, Kraigg Brathwaite, Shai Hope and Shane Dowrich - have scored over 1,000 runs across the last three calendar years combined and among those four, none of them has boasted an average over 32. And this is primarily one of the reasons why the series win against England a couple of years ago needs to be considered as a mere one-off, for the simple fact that the Windies got over the line in the series due to freak knocks from Holder and Dowrich and an astonishing performance from their bowlers. That they lost the only Test in the series - the final Test at Gros Islet - were these two things didn’t happen at once by a staggering 232-run margin should tell you everything you need to know.
There is no doubt that their bowlers will most likely terrorize the English batsmen, but it will matter for little - and will most likely be in a losing cause - unless and until their batsmen bat out of their skin. And that, at this very moment, looks very, very unlikely. Two of their top five batsmen - John Campbell and Shamarh Brooks - have played just nine Tests between them and none outside of West Indies and India and among the other three, Roston Chase is the only batsman who has averaged over 25 since the start of 2019. The team they are up against have not lost a single series at home in over six years and it was only a couple of years ago that they made a mockery of the best Test team in the world; and, for all we know, they might have routed the Aussies, too, if it wasn’t for the man who was born in this planet just to make their life miserable.
We can hype the Windies all we want and desperately cling on to the hope that their bowlers will make the series a close affair, if not help them win it, but the impending reality is that it will be the batsmen who will decide the fate of the tour. If history were to mean anything, the men from the Caribbean are in for a pretty short stay in the United Kingdom. But sport is all about rewriting history and perhaps a good start to the same would be putting an end to the 2402-day long 500-run drought that is hovering over their heads.
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