West Indies turn to Lara and co after record Test low, but future looks bleak

The Guardian

23-07-2025

'People are coming and going like the walking dead, padding up and unpadding.' Michael Clarke surveys the hallucinogenic scene in front of him at Newlands in November 2011, the grand view of Table Mountain unlikely to ease the agony, his first-innings 151 now chip-shop paper. Clarke's Australia are 21 for nine, sliding towards the lowest total in Test history.
Nathan Lyon and Peter Siddle get them to 47 to avoid record-breaking embarrassment but it's barely consolatory. 'By the time we go back into the field, we're still unable to accept what's happening,' Clarke writes in his autobiography. 'We look like a cricket team, but we are 11 ghosts, unable to believe this reality.' South Africa have a target of 236 – hardly straightforward – but Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla ton up in an eight-wicket procession.
Well, at least West Indies didn't have to field. Their 27 all out against Australia last week at Sabina Park, completing a 176-run loss and series whitewash, bears a couple of explanations. This was a low-scoring three-Test series all the way through, the highest individual effort Brandon King's 75, and the pink ball is more dangerous than any other weapon in Mitchell Starc's hand. But this also bears repeating: twenty-seven. Tragic for rock'n'roll, a new low point for the Caribbean game.
Cricket West Indies' president was quick with the state-of-emergency announcement. 'There will be some sleepless nights ahead for many of us, including the players, who I know feel this loss just as heavily,' said Kishore Shallow. He called for a meeting and invited the legendary triumvirate of Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards and Brian Lara to contribute their views. 'This engagement is not ceremonial,' Shallow added, before immediately harking back to 'our golden eras'. An impromptu nostalgia fest seems unlikely to solve decades-long decay.
Deep introspection is a natural reaction to a two-digit total. In 2013, Brendon McCullum won the toss under blue skies in Cape Town and chose to bat in his first Test as New Zealand captain. South Africa were batting by lunch, McCullum's men cooked for 45 inside 20 overs.
Mike Hesson, New Zealand's head coach, knocked on McCullum's door that evening and was joined by other members of the backroom staff as the discussion turned to something bigger than technique and selection. 'We just spoke from our hearts,' McCullum later recalled. 'About who we were as a team and how we were perceived by the public. It was agreed that we were seen as arrogant, emotional, distant from our public, and we were up ourselves … We were full of bluster but soft as putty.' Two years later, after a run of six Test series without defeat, they found adoration on the way to their first World Cup final.
West Indies are not new to this kind of distress. Lara experienced it first-hand and moved on from it with his own stubborn extravagance. In 1999, when Steve Waugh's Australia bowled West Indies out for 51 in Trinidad, Lara responded with a double hundred in Jamaica that same week. His magnum opus 153 not out followed in the next Test.
In 2004, England's tour of the Caribbean began with Steve Harmison taking seven for 12. 'The English now had these towering brutes bowling chin music,' Lara later wrote, noting the role reversal, his own quicks no longer the ones to fear. The hosts were shot out for 47, their lowest total until this month. Lara still found room for his world-record 400 at the end of the four-match series, a luxury not afforded to the current generation.
India experienced the pain in December 2020 when undone for 36 in the first Test against Australia in Adelaide – another pink-ball collapse – but that performance continues to grow in significance. Prithvi Shaw and Wriddhiman Saha were discarded for the next Test, replaced by Shubman Gill, on debut, and Rishabh Pant. The series turned India's way and the pair have done pretty well for themselves since.
Sri Lanka produced their lowest total just eight months ago, bowled out for 42 in Durban, but they at least showed ticker with 282 in the fourth innings. The in-game recovery doesn't quite match that of Australia's women against England in the second Test in Melbourne 67 years ago. The hosts were dismissed for 38 in the first dig on a wet surface. 'England were killing themselves laughing,' Betty Wilson, the great Australian all-rounder, told Cricinfo. Wilson twirled to figures of seven for seven to bowl them out for 35 in reply. She failed to clock her hat-trick to finish the innings, notified only on the way off the field. 'This sudden revelation caught me unawares and I started crying,' she said. 'I was just determined that they wouldn't get the runs.'
Will any of these comebacks, collective and individual, provide hope to West Indies supporters? Probably not. Unlike India, who were bowled out for 46 by New Zealand last October, West Indies have no world-beating reserves to call upon, no control of the game's financial model, no recent triumphs to talk about in the other forms. It used to be that the men's red-ball failures were partly assuaged by their Twenty20 excellence, World Cup victories in 2012 and 2016 something to cling to, the power of Chris Gayle and co enough to rally round.
But there is decline in that sphere, too. As West Indies perished to two 3-0 series defeats in England last month, Nicholas Pooran – Wisden's leading T20 cricketer in the world – announced his retirement from international cricket at 29, his remaining days to play out in the far more profitable franchise world. 'I'm pretty sure more will follow in that direction,' warned Daren Sammy, their head coach, adding that there are challenges in 'trying to keep our players motivated to play for the crest'. No wonder the desire to go back in time.
'When we came that morning, there was a slight silence but a focused silence in the changing room,' Keshav Maharaj tells the Spin. The morning, of course, is from last month at Lord's, with South Africa still 69 runs away from winning the World Test Championship. 'I wouldn't say it was nerves because I've seen our team nervous.' No, this time was different. After all the last-four failures and a lost final the year before, they got it done, that dreaded c-word told to do one.
When did Maharaj know that the title was theirs? 'Definitely in the last 10 runs, although it was a nervy 10 runs, but I think the five wickets in hand was our saving grace at the time.' Maharaj spoke tearfully minutes after victory, with Graeme Smith, the former South Africa captain, asking the questions. 'I couldn't hold back my emotions. I was never going to do it. If you saw Dale Steyn in that interview as well, he burst into tears. It just shows how much it meant to us as a nation. I know Graeme was a little bit stronger than all of us, but I could see the passion and raw emotion within his eyes as well.'
The win 'hasn't fully sunk in yet', says Maharaj, who then captained a new-look South Africa side against Zimbabwe at the end of June, the match including the 35-year-old's 200th Test wicket. Maharaj is the first South African spinner to reach the mark. 'Spin is a dying art in the world,' he says. 'I just want to pave the way for the next generation to believe that spin, the art of bowling spin, is something you can pursue and make a career from and be one of the world's best.'
That'll explain the respect for Liam Dawson. Maharaj faced his fellow left-armer when Dawson last played Test cricket on South Africa's tour of England in 2017. 'He's come on leaps and bounds,' says Maharaj. 'To see how he's done in SA20, and he's dominated quite significantly in the last three years of county cricket. Always rated him as a bowler. He's also a great human being. When I had my achilles injury, he reached out to me because he had a similar injury, so it was quite nice. He's a wonderful asset, not just from a bowling perspective, but as a package because he bats as well.'
I asked him a few questions about the tactics, whether you're going to stick with the 3-4-3 this season' – Kuldeep Yadav got his chat on with Ruben Amorim after India met up with Manchester United.
With this week's Test match in Manchester, we take a look back at a painful experience there in 2014 for an England great when the home nation defied the loss of Stuart Broad at Old Trafford with a broken nose, romping to a second consecutive victory over an India team whose spirit then had been fractured, as Andy Wilson reported here.
India's captain, Shubman Gill, reckons that England breached 'spirit of the game' during the third Test at Lord's, Simon Burnton reports, while Ali Martin tees up the fourth Test at Manchester.
Gary Naylor shares the frustration of county cricket fans left waiting until September for the T20 Blast quarter-finals.
And while Australia's selectors took a punt on Sam Konstas as Test opener – he is left with the debt, writes Geoff Lemon.
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