ENGLAND TRIP LIGHT FANTASTIC!
ENGLAND v WEST INDIES PAUL NEWMAN Root and Cook rack up runs after another early wobble
THIS step into the unknown became a tale of the very predictable yesterday when Joe Root and Alastair Cook took rapid and emphatic control of the first day-night Test in England.
It does not matter if the ball is pink, red, white or even blue if one side is so much better than the other, and the first day of the three-match Investec series was an ominous sign that West Indies could be facing a long and difficult month.
This was a miserable bowling display on a flat pitch and with a pink Duke ball that pretty much behaved in the same way as a red one would have done, at least until a single hour or so of darkness.
That should take nothing away from the quality of two contrasting but equally effective batsmen who treated a near full house to a one-sided onslaught that has already put England in a near impregnable position. Only when Kemar Roach swung one through the defences of Root for a brilliant 136 as darkness began to take hold to end a stand of 248 with Cook was the England domination halted and some respite gained for West Indies.
At a close that came at 9.30pm, Cook had stood firm after quenching his own desire for an overdue first-innings hundred and Dawid Malan had survived a more testing last hour to take England to 348 for three. The air of predictability even stretched to England’s ongoing problems at the top of the order, with two early wickets again falling before Root and Cook came together for an all too familiar rescue act.
When Mark Stoneman, the oldest England specialist batting debutant at 30 since Steve James in 1998, confidently stroked two fours off Roach’s first over it looked as though the selectors might have finally struck gold. But he soon had his delayed introduction to the highest level cut short by an extremely rare beauty from Roach.
Not many left-handers could have stopped a ball that swung in before seaming away and taking the very top of his off-stump.
When Miguel Cummins had Tom Westley playing all round a straight one to leave England 39 for two — a rare mistake from Marais Erasmus in turning down the appeal was corrected by technology — a familiar story was unfolding.
Yet sadly for West Indies the expected script stretched to an England recovery at this ground where they have lost just eight of the previous 49 men’s Tests.
Neither Roach, the pick of an uninspiring attack, nor any other member of a bowling unit minus their fastest bowler in Shannon Gabriel, could muster any sort of a threat as a 4pm ‘lunch’ and a 6.40pm ‘tea’ came and went.
The pink ball stubbornly refused to offer any real assistance, Root and Cook filling their boots with the ball regularly racing to the boundary, and West Indian shoulders sagging in a performance barely more than county standard.
Michael Holding, Curtly Ambrose, Andy Roberts and Joel Garner were all here to see a pale imitation of the once great West Indies attack but frankly they are long past the point where it would have come as any sort of surprise.
There was not even any real Caribbean pace to trouble England’s batsmen, with Roach now focusing more on control than speed and the 20-year-old aspirant Alzarri Joseph enduring a difficult first day of Test cricket in England.
Too often Root fails to convert a half century — he has fallen 17 times in Test cricket between 70 and 89 — but here he reached his 13th Test hundred off 139 balls.
By the time Roach summoned up one more big effort to break through Root’s defences, he had faced 189 balls in all and struck 22 fluent boundaries in his second big hundred in only his fifth