Win Projections to be updated soon
Test cricket draws you into the story from the first. The XIs are shown here. These are the prerequisites. Proceed with it. That’s what happened on Wednesday, the opening day of the West Indies men’s series versus South Africa, at Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.
After 15 overs, play was stopped by rain. Since television is such a heavy medium, there has to be something to occupy all those suddenly vacant hours. A video of the March 2022 Test match between Grenada and England suddenly appeared.
Grass was present! There was movement! The bowlers continued to rush in for a cause! As soon as it was made public, the Queen’s Park Oval pitch used for this match was revealed to be an affront to Test cricket. There was no bounce, no grass, hardly any purpose to try and take wickets or bat with any effort, and it seemed like no consideration was paid to the few onlookers or the television viewers beyond.
The surface was quite different from another grievance against Test cricket, which was the pitch at Newlands used for the January match against India. The second day’s match ended an hour after midday, with the ICC kindly declaring the pitch to be “unsatisfactory”. The pitch is the reason why nobody will be interested in this match, which dragged on for 98 overs on Thursday. Playing more T20s, T10s, tape-ball games, gully cricket, or even French cricket is a solid case in favour of doing something other than this laborious torture known as Test cricket.
You may have heard that the reason the pitch is in such bad shape is because too much club cricket has been played there lately, which has prevented the grass from growing back correctly. It’s not a very good reason. 88 days before to the start of the Test, on May 11, the West Indies’ home summer schedule and locations were revealed. That is 22 days longer than the IPL season this year.
You have no business operating a major cricket ground if you can’t get your act together well enough in that amount of time to guarantee that the highlight of your season at a premier venue – among several others where club games could have been played.
has a decent enough covering of grass on the pitch to Trinidad make it worth watching, or even worth playing.
When Jayden Seales bowled the opening delivery of the ninth over on Thursday, following Tea, there was sympathy for him. Temba Bavuma’s bat suffered a hit from the ball on its outside edge. Had the pitch been even slightly correct, the catch would have slid into the slip cordon at waist level. It died a languid death on this corpse of a surface long before it reached their waiting hands.
Seales was understandably furious. It could have been the final straw. After all, he is from Trinidad, and prior to this game, he had bowled 297 balls in first-class cricket at Queen’s Park Oval, taking just seven wickets. Perhaps he thought the pitch would be better this time. Who wouldn’t have been disappointed to learn they were wrong?
So when a catch that ought to have dropped loosely between the crease and the catchers did, Seales glared at the gloomy surface and screamed, “Get up!” He circumvented the issue two balls later by spearing a delivery into Bavuma’s pads on the full for a brilliant leg before wicket. If you remove pitches like this from the equation by refusing to give them the benefit of the doubt, they cannot harm you. But it was difficult to muster the energy to successfully get across the surface’s barrier because of the 30s temperature and 60s humidity.
The hitters in South Africa had an obstacle: to avoid being bored. The majority of them did. Bavuma was in half-century partnerships with Ryan Rickelton, David Bedingham, and Tony de Zorzi, and the three men went far beyond the age of fifty. Another fifty stands were added by Wiaan Mulder and Kyle Verreynne. However, hitting on this pitch is like to attempting to drive hundreds of kilometres on a perfectly straight road while staying up through the night.
Bowling on it is a selfless act. Therefore, praise must go to Jomel Warrican, who turned the tide in favour of the home team in the fifth over by dismissing Verreynne and Keshav Maharaj with back-to-back return catches off consecutive deliveries. A low dive to Warrican’s left allowed Claiming the second of them to be claimed, a marvel all around.
Seales was not happy with Kagiso Rabada’s lack of decision-making in the subsequent over, as the ball sailed off the top edge to the fine leg boundary for four. The fifth delivery from Seales in the subsequent over was similarly brief and struck Rabada’s shoulder, which may come back to haunt the West Indian, injure him, or both.
Also Read: 1st day after South Africa choose to bat is cut short by rain
Warrican’s double strike set off a late surge of energy that gave the home team a boost. They outperformed their opponents, who will be unhappy with their nearly perfect score of 344/8 given their previous performance of 271/5. What’s more, the West Indians performed a better job of defeating the antagonist. This pitch is not good enough for anyone involved, players included.
India
