It was impossible not to be moved by the scenes on Sunday morning as the Grenadians in the National Cricket Stadium sang a rousing rendition of David Rudder’s seminal calypso, Rally Round the West Indies, and their team duly panned out a tuneful series win.
England’s tail-end defiance had lasted just 11.2 overs, fiddling out 17 more runs before the last two wickets fell and setting a lowly target of 28 runs. West Indies didn’t muck about, their ice-cool captain, Kraigg Brathwaite, fittingly wrapping up a 10-wicket victory and the Richards‑Botham Trophy 1-0 at 11.28am local time when he clipped Chris Woakes to leg and hustled the last two runs.
Handshakes out of the way, Brathwaite then led his side on a lap of honour around the ground before the champagne-soaked presentation, drinking in the applause for a triumph that was all but sealed on day three when Joshua Da Silva’s maiden Test century and five wickets for the 75mph stingers of Kyle Mayers turned England’s hopes of arresting their sorry run of results into bleached coral. Jason Holder’s one-handed reflex catch at leg slip as Kemar Roach shut down the final morning was also a memorable coup de grâce.
Over the course of the three Test matches West Indies fought impressively to get into a position where they could snatch the decider, with the bloodyminded batting of Nkrumah Bonner and Holder in Antigua, and that of Brathwaite and Jermaine Blackwood in Barbados, pushing back when two lost tosses on flat pitches made it an uphill struggle.
But then this is a region that faces an incline just to compete in Test cricket let alone win; even a hopefully bumper 2022 for Cricket West Indies will still bring in around £56m, or roughly a quarter of the revenues that the England and Wales Cricket Board receives from its broadcast deal. This is a high cost, low income part of the world to run a sport during the good times, let alone when local economies have been ravaged by the pandemic.
Yet despite this, and the talent drain to domestic Twenty20 leagues over the past decade, the West Indies Test team continue to defy the odds when they take on the far better remunerated England side at home. They raise their game impressively and play with an enviable sense of purpose and soul that feels so lacking in the corporate buzzword world of English cricket.
Truly this tour goes down as the latest example of the latter. The so-called “red-ball reset” just feels an empty post-Ashes rebrand that involved sacking coaches, dropping players but shoring up Joe Root’s captaincy by removing two performing veterans in Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad. Why? Because, reading between the lines, their standards were somehow too high.
Overseen by Andrew Strauss and Paul Collingwood, interim managing director and coach respectively, and yet never owned by a captain who, 64 matches into the job, should surely be able to speak his mind here, their absence smacked of yet more future-obsessed overthink at the expense of the present. West Indies and Test cricket appeared to be disrespected too.
England have espoused a new dressing room culture on this tour and got giddy when, to pinch a line from Rudder, the runs began to flow like water in benign conditions. Come the business end of that defining third day here, when Da Silva was marshalling the West Indies tail and when the ball was doing a wee bit with some added scoreboard pressure, it counted for very little.
Trevor Bayliss, the former England head coach, was adamant when he left in 2019 that five years was the maximum amount of time before a leader’s voice lost impact in the dressing room. Root is starting year six and to hear him speak of “big strides forward” made one wonder whether the supposedly improved team environment is built on delusion.
In truth there were only a few incremental positives. Saqib Mahmood looks to have the skills and gumption for Test cricket and Jack Leach ended up leading wicket-taker and delivered first innings economy, even if match-winning performances outside of Asia are still to materialise. Ben Stokes also hinted at being somewhere back to his best in that destructive 120 in Barbados, having lasered his focus on Test cricket, while, overall, Jonny Bairstow’s winter has rejuvenated a talent that could have been lost to white ball specialism.
Elsewhere there was frustration to be found: that Zak Crawley made a century in Antigua by eschewing his dangerous early drives, only to instantly forget this; that Dan Lawrence crackled on the roads but lost his off stump in the finale; that Ben Foakes shrunk when offered a chance many felt was long overdue.
Ollie Robinson’s absence for all three Tests on fitness grounds – another topic Root chooses to deflect rather than grasp – was also lamentable and the loss of Mark Wood unfortunate. The lack of threat from Woakes and Craig Overton overseas, on the other hand, was not a huge surprise.
England have now gone winless in their past five Test series (India, who they trail 2-1, finish their Covid‑affected 2021 tour this year) and it is clear that the new managing director and head coach – and you’d think a new captain – will to have to seriously rally to stop this run rolling into the summer.
