England take the series Test Cricket is done no favours at all
England did a professional job to wrap up the series 2-0 as the West Indies rolled back the years to their very best deck-of-cards impressions to collapse in an abject heap. They lost their last 7 wickets for just 35 runs in the face of some frankly pretty unplayable bowling from James Anderson and Tim Bresnan.
And so endeth the series that nobody really wanted. England will have benefited from their players being given a good workout and gaining some form and confidence, as well as solving a few of the problem areas ahead of the Ashes. The number 3 spot is sorted in the form of Ravi Bopara, and in Graham Onions, they have unearthed a bowler who just could have a future at this level. But beyond that the series has had little to commend it.
Frankly, the West Indies have been a disgrace. There is nothing more unforgivable in professional sport than a lack of pride and the Windies looked to have given up by the end of the first day at Lords. If you take out the day lost to rain in Durham, the West Indies lost in 3 and 3.5 days, a pretty meek effort. After their first significant test series win for 6 years, they surrendered the Wisden Trophy after just 69 days, surely a record for profligacy with silverware.
Even those who look back with nostalgia at the great days of the 1970s and 1980s will have felt little sympathy for the travails of the current batch over the past couple of weeks. You can barely afford to carry one passenger at this level but, with a few notable exceptions in Sarwan, Chanderpaul , Ramdin and Edwards, the West Indies have been full of them. And if a team takes its tone from the captain, their plight on this tour has been hardly surprising. Chris Gayle, who looked to be instrumental in the recent progress of the team, was at the heart of everything bad about this tour – a lack of enthusiasm, application and respect for the game which beggars belief in a test captain. His reputation has been severely damaged and it is all his own doing.
However, this series must become a cautionary tale for those in the game’s corridors of power. At a time when test cricket needs all the help it can get to avoid being overwhelmed by the seemingly unstoppable tide of Twenty20, this series has done some real damage. England is traditionally the one country who can consistently fill test grounds and yet empty seats have been an inescapable feature of this series.
The message for the authorities to take away is that it is not always the case that any cricket is better than no cricket. It can now be seen that that is palpably not true. When a touring team have negligible warm up time in the lead up to a series, it is not a level playing field, something which is an essential criterion for any sporting contest. A casual observer would have a pretty warped impression of the traditional form of the game.
The constant pursuit of money is misguided and the powers-that-be need to take a step back and realise that their primary role is for the wellbeing of the game. They may claim that this takes money and to do that they need to fit in more games and please the broadcasters but, just as the public can be drawn towards fascinating sport, they can be driven away by one-sided and rather pointless tedium.
I hope that lessons are learned from this series because it has been an unsatisfactory exercise, although it clearly has not been helped by the attitude of the West Indies. But when the time of year, the structure of the tour, the place in the cricket calendar and its place in the summer’s schedule are all wrong then even die-hards are going to have their patience tested. It’s time for the authorities to put away their shoehorn and arrange fixtures that people want to watch at a time when they want to watch it because the best possible cricket will be on show.
by Stuart Peel
