Notes on the Barbados Test
Dull pitches, tired mistakes, and scouting reports on Saqib, Fisher and Lees
CEO Brown
It is very easy to see this pitch, the Antigua deck, and the couple in Pakistan and overreact a little bit. After just two draws, I saw one journalist saying that we needed to ensure that wickets help bowlers more. Despite how wickets have massively helped bowlers in the last five years.
But it would be silly to ignore that these pitches are flat as Dan Lawrence’s overexposed stomach.
Are these four Tests what I once dubbed CEO brown pitches? Which came from the 2005-15 period of cricket where CEOs thought the best thing possible was to get five days of cricket, even if that meant the wicket produced tedious play.
And it often did, much of the Tests in that period were incredibly biased towards batters, and it was dull. It was very different in 2018/19. To make a run then you had to sacrifice a green-eyed virgin at midnight in a volcano. But what should be at the front of anyone’s mind is that there needs to be balance.
These four Tests have reminded us how pointless these kinds of wickets are. Players making runs is fine. Batters standing on pitches that they can only be dismissed by playing whatever shot Jason Holder played yesterday is not.
Getting the extra ticket revenue doesn’t help if no one is positively talking about your Tests. And that is what was lost in the previous era. Now that social media is so much stronger, I feel it’s even tougher to put out the CEO brown Tests.
Do your sponsors and rights’ partners really want to be associated with a sporting event equivalent of a bored sigh?
Tired
On the third day of this Test, West Indies batted all day very slowly, and by the end, even the viewers felt fatigued. And as the final session was about to finish, three mistakes were made.
The first was Kraigg Brathwaite coming down the wicket to Jack Leach. He faced around 300 balls from Leach without the need to dance down. This was quite clearly an odd choice in the dusk of day three. The fact he missed it was worse.
But luckily for him, so did Ben Foakes. Even specialist keepers make mistakes, though we’ve now built up his keeping so much that any error feels like he is letting down wicket keeping as an art form.
But this was a bad miss; Brathwaite didn’t give many chances over his 600 ball 900 minute Test. And this was low and out of nowhere. But Foakes had already decided the ball would hit his pads and then thought it would crash into the stumps. The first two are the sort of thing you see from players who aren't keepers from a young age. But he also came up too soon out of his crouch and never got a hand on it. That's a technical error you wouldn't expect from Foakes.
A over or so later Jermaine Blackwood - in the middle of one of his best Test innings - was facing Dan Lawrence’s novice offspin. To a ball pitched a foot outside off stump from a man turning it back in, Blackwood shouldered arms. It was a spectacularly weird choice. He misread the ball so bad that he also reviewed the LBW decision. He had no idea about the delivery twice.
It’s possible he thought it might bounce too high, though from that length that seems optimistic. It’s not possible he didn’t think it could spin back that far. It’s possible that he was tired and he committed to the leave before the ball was bowled. His bat was so high by the time it arrived.
What I found interesting from all this is how out of character or against narrative they were. Brathwaite a rush of blood, Foakes acting like a part time keeper, and Blackwood leaving the ball.
Scouting reports
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