One-sided Test leaves cricket with red faces

YoU CAN have all the pink balls, floodlights and fake Birmingham beaches you can muster, but if you do not have a contest then Test cricket will wither and die.

That is the brutal truth of the mis-match that masqueraded as the first day-night Test in this country when the difference between England and West Indies was like — well, night and day.

England cannot be faulted for the way they dismantled feeble opposition within three rain-affected days. There will be plenty of their former players with little sympathy because of the pain inflicted by the great West Indian sides.

And it would be wrong not to recognise the supreme hunger for runs and concentration of Alastair Cook and the great skill of Stuart Broad in going past Sir Ian Botham’s Test tally of wickets in a thumping innings and 209-run victory.

But no new fan lured to Edgbaston by the novelty value of Test cricket under lights with a different colour ball will come back for more when the game is so thoroughly one-sided — with West Indies losing an astonishing 19 wickets on the third day — that it is painful to watch.

Sad, too, because the health of West Indian cricket is so integral to the world game. Yet all their better players seem interested in is chasing the Twenty20 dollar.

The most damning indictment of the imposters impersonating the West Indies team at Edgbaston is that the truly great players from their past who were there to see it appear to have gone beyond anger.

I said last Thursday that this first Test could be over by Saturday night if rain stayed away, but even the deluge that wiped out Friday’s evening session could not help West Indies drag the match into Sunday.

No wonder Stuart Law, their Australian coach and as combative as they come, had his head in his hands during Thursday’s play because West Indies were not just bad, they were unprofessional and even looked uninterested.

Nobody expected this callow West Indies team to beat England but what we did expect was that they would at least look like they wanted to be here representing a proud region in the form of the game where once they were kings.

Instead, we saw fielders with their hands in their pockets, others barely giving chase to the boundary, bowlers feeding the strengths of Cook and displaying a complete lack of discipline and batsmen barely using their feet.

Under captain Jason Holder (below) there was astonishing tactical naivety, too, never more so than when West Indies failed to take the second new ball when due and then bowled spin when they finally did get their hands on it. The first rule of pink-ball cricket? That the best time to get wickets is under lights with seam when the ball is new.

Perhaps we should not be surprised at West Indies’ lack of nous for earlier this year one of their players, Shannon Gabriel, fell to possibly the dumbest dismissal in the history of the game to hand Pakistan victory in Dominica.

Gabriel, at No 11, needed to fend off one more ball to leave Roston Chase to bat out the last over for a drawn third Test and series. Instead, he swung at a wide delivery from Yasir Shah, got an inside edge and was bowled. That lack of game intelligence was fully in evidence in Birmingham.

Reservations about day- night Test cricket in England proved to be justified, too. What works in Australia and Dubai does not work in a country where it does not get dark until an hour before close of play. Yes, white clothing and a pink ball made Edgbaston look great under lights when it was finally dark, but the fact that the crowd was by then thinning out told you everything you needed to know.

The ECB are said to want more daynight Tests, possibly even one next year. But they should dismiss the idea.

There should also be context to all Test cricket, with the introduction of two divisions and a global championship. And some of the millions sloshing around in the world game should be spent on making sure the format is more attractive to those players who are turning their backs on it, like so many West Indians. The public are not stupid. There are only so many times they can gain their enjoyment by joining in a conga led by Mr Blobby.

They want a proper game of Test cricket and they did not get it at Edgbaston. That should leave those who champion the pink

ball with red faces.