Windies fortunes dive to new low
THE West Indies will today be fighting to avoid their worst ever defeat, after hometown heroes Peter Siddle and James Pattinson reduced Test cricket’s walking dead to a decaying corpse at the MCG.
Australia’s batsmen have now compiled a staggering 1134 runs in two innings this series for the loss of just seven wickets.
Never before in a Test series has the average runs (160 plus) for each wicket been this high – with the Windies bowlers paying double the price for their scalps than any attack in history.
In reply, the West Indies have so far lost 24 wickets at 462 and are a Test nation in name only.
This Boxing Day party is only the third time that Australia has had four or more batsmen compile hundreds in an innings, with the stellar contributions made by Joe Burns, Usman Khawaja, Steve Smith and Adam Voges the most against the West Indies since 1955.
Yesterday the world’s best player Smith took over as the year’s leading run-scorer with yet another hundred and Voges became the fourth fastest Australian to 1000 Test runs with a second consecutive unbeaten century or more.
Declaring at 3-551 midway through the second session, it was then the bowlers’ turn to hammer home the Windies’ misery, with Siddle, Pattinson and Nathan Lyon taking two wickets each to leave the tourists skittled at 6-91 at stumps on day two.
If Australia get through their work early today and decide to enforce the follow-on, the Windies’ will be staring down the barrel of a second consecutive capitulation inside three days and the most comprehensive series loss in their history.
Pattinson (2-36) has now taken seven of the past 11 Windies wickets to fall this series as he ramped up his exciting comeback to Test cricket in front of 40,516 home fans at the MCG.
The boisterous crowd then went into overdrive in the shadows of stumps as veteran Siddle (2-19) bulldozed his way through Denesh Ramdin and captain Jason Holder to put himself on a hat-trick.
A second career hat-trick wasn’t forthcoming as debutant Carlos Braithwaite kept out the money ball, but it was a dynamic over that injected further life into Siddle’s form renaissance this summer.
Captain Smith will be wary of overcooking his bowlers on day three given the turnaround to the final Test in Sydney is tight and his fast bowling stocks have already been ravaged by injury.
However, if the Windies continue to fall over like tenpins in the morning there’s no reason why Josh Hazlewood and company can’t power through.
There is no doubt now that this is the worst Windies team to ever tour Australia and one of the most pathetic outfits international cricket has seen.
A run of humiliating ducks to their senior men Marlon Samuels, Ramdin and Holder said it all.
This is a rudderless team that’s lost the will to fight.