Four things the West Indies might learn from their Australian tour

The third and final Test of the West Indies tour to Australia ended in its predictable draw late on Thursday, and with it, the Frank Worrell Trophy remains in Australia for now and the foreseeable future.

Despite having been at the Sydney Test on Sunday – and imagine being one of the suckers who paid for a day at the SCG this summer! – the start and end of this match felt rather distantly detached.

There was some initial hope that the teams might look to force a result in one way or another, but those hopes were slowly extinguished as the West Indies batted through the rain-shortened first session.

And maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I kind of like that the final result wasn’t 3-0. I certainly get the argument that they weren’t really good enough to finish with anything other than a complete series sweep, but the West Indies should be allowed to take confidence out of the way they improved over the course of their month-long tour of Australia.

That all said, here are a few lessons I believe they should heed.

More cricket:
» Pattinson the Aussie to watch in 2016
» The Liebke Ratings: Australia vs West Indies third Test
» Gayle-forced hypocrisy
» Demonising of Chris Gayle is political correctness gone mad
» Steve Smith’s Border-esque rebuild (new longform!)

Jason Holder is a player – and a captain – to build around
Jason Holder came to Australia with just ten Tests under his belt, and two of them as captain. He’d already toured Australia as skipper, of course, leading the West Indies side during last summer’s World Cup.

And I’ve got to say, I was impressed by what I saw this summer.

Yes, he’s still learning how to be a captain and he’s certainly still learning a lot about his teammates and their attitudes toward training, playing, and probably life itself. Sometimes his field placements were a bit curious, and sometimes his bowling changes made no sense.

But what I liked about him is that despite being barely 24 years of age, Holder is already a leader of men; men who in some cases he’s giving up more than a few years to. Holder is a quietly spoken leader, but one who leads by example.

The sight of him winning the chase to a ball yesterday over teammates who were in better and closer positions will stick with me as one of the out-takes of the summer. Here was a guy who, despite being on the end of some pretty solid thumpings this summer, was still putting in on the last day of the tour.

And his numbers were pretty good, too. Not so much his wickets, obviously, where the Windies only took 12 wickets between them over the three Tests. James Pattinson and Nathan Lyon took 13 wickets each!

But Holder bowled 12 maidens out of his 61 overs for the series, and an overall economy rate of 3.04 runs per over. His supposed pace spearheads, Jerome Taylor and Kemar Roach, went at 5.6 and 6.0 runs per over, respectively, and bowled only two maidens each from 40-plus overs. Not even one in every 20.

101 runs at 20 isn’t earth-shattering as an all-rounder, but it’s still a better return from a number seven than several of his top-order batsmen.

If the West Indies don’t bugger him around completely – and there’s not a whole lot of confidence in that qualifier – then Holder is certainly the player to lead the inexperienced team. A lot of the touring squad are of a similar age, and if they can develop as cricketers and men together, then there could easily be a useful team emerge in a few years’ time.

…but I’m not sure there’s much point in keeping Marlon Samuels
Oh, Marlon. Even expecting sod-all from you this tour, you’ve still managed to disappoint me.

35 runs at 7.00 from five innings, and with a top score of 19. All coming in second-drop. Even in the tour games, Samuels only managed scores of 21 and 45 against teams that were a long way off first class.

He can’t bowl in international games now, by decree of a terrible-looking action and ICC verdict, and his general body language in the field is underwhelming at best.

Samuels still doesn’t average 34 with the bat in more than 60 Tests going back 15 years. It’s often been said that there aren’t any young players back in the Caribbean better than these touring squad members, but surely there are plenty no worse than Samuels.

At almost 35 years of age, I just don’t see the point selecting him from here on.

Darren Bravo is the middle order rock
I made this point during the Melbourne Test, of course, but it bears repeating among these broader lessons.

Bravo topped the West Indies’ batting tallies, with 247 at 49.4, and with the very well-made 108 in Hobart and the arguably more important 81 in the first innings in Melbourne, when he came in at 1-35 and was the last wicket to fall.

Again, in a young team with a massive fight for Test credibility in front of them, Bravo is the pretty obvious guy to build a batting order around.

People highlighting the West Indies’ flaws do so because they care
One of the disappointments of the summer was certainly the temporary ban the West Indies team tried to impose on travelling journalist and commentator, Fazeer Mohammed.

The only Caribbean journalist in Australia to cover the series, Mohammad – who was also a big part of the ABC Grandstand coverage – was informed during the Melbourne Test that he would no longer have access to the West Indies team, for the crime of telling a radio station in Barbados that the tourists didn’t train with anything like the intensity of the Australians.

I saw the Windies commence their field session in Sydney before the Test started, and even in the 20 minutes or so I watched, I can completely understand where Mohammed was coming from. As it was, his view was backed by numerous media colleagues at the time. The ban only lasted a few days, as it turned out, but it still seemed a petty imposition just for expressing a truthful opinion.

Mohammed doesn’t, and neither did Michael Holding or Tony Cozier, or any other commentator before them, have anything to gain from being critical of the WICB; they merely and desperately seek improvement in Caribbean cricket. Seeing the once ‘Calypso Kings’, the team that adorned more than a few bedroom walls around the cricketing world back in the day (including mine), battling to stay above even Bangladesh and Zimbabwe in the Test rankings must grate them no end.

And worse, seeing the WICB showing absolutely no interest in accepting external review recommendations about how the game should be governed, or even showing signs that they may be interested in discussing the issues at hand, must rankle these passionate Caribbean cricket people to their core.

You could see it in the passionate address recently of Sir Garfield Sobers, and you could hear it in Mohammed’s voice this series; there is a genuine fear that West Indies cricket might get worse both on and off the field before it gets better.

Faced with that prospect, it’s no wonder that passionate people would speak out. The real shame is that the people who should be listening are too busy protecting their own patch.