“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.”
after newsletter promotion
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.
