A graphical view of England vs. West Indies, 1st Test Match, London, played 22-26 July, 2004 by Jack Solock

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Scorecard:

England v West Indies

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Inexplicably, with the weakest attack in world cricket this side of Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, West Indies Captain Brian Lara won the toss and put England in on a belter at Lord's. The result was predictable. Four sessions and 568 runs later, West Indies were looking at a mountain they couldn't scale.

 

 

Three times before in this, his second tour as West Indies Captain, Lara had won the toss and batted 2nd. Australia rattled up 605/9 declared in a nine wicket win at Bridgetown in May 2003 on the deadest pitch Steve Waugh had ever played on. South Africa knocked off 604/6 declared at Centurion on their way to a 10 wicket win in January 2004. The tactic had only worked against Sri Lanka on a fast surface at Kingston in June 2003. The game graph shows that, in the larger scheme of things, this match was pretty much decided by the mammoth 291 run 2nd wicket partnership between Andrew Strauss and Robert Key, two players who had played in 11 Tests total going into the match. It was the largest 2nd wicket partnership for England against West Indies, breaking the record of 266 set by Peter Richardson and Tom Graveney at Trent Bridge in 1957. Served up dross almost exclusively by a West Indies attack that didn't seem to realize that the three sticks 22 yards down the pitch were the target, Strauss and Key prospered, gorging themselves on runs for over 4 and a half hours. By the end of the first day, England had put up 391 runs, their highest total in the 1st day of a Lord's Test since the 428 they put up against South Africa in 1907. After Strauss went, Key kept on with Captain Michael Vaughan for a partnership of 165 runs. When Key finally went, with his highest first class score of 221, England had almost 500 runs on the board, and West Indies were doomed.

 

They certainly didn't play as if doomed, however, as Chris Gayle and Devon Smith put on a swashbuckling opening partnership of 118 runs in a little over an hour and a half against some mediocre English bowling. But as can be seen below, while an hour and a half of fireworks can win a One Day International, in a Test match it is a drop in the sea. 125 runs in two and a half hours put on by Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Duane Bravo helped West Indies save the follow on. Chanderpaul finished unbeaten on 128, as the bottom (save for Omari Banks) fell out.

 

In their second innings England needed to put up runs quickly to give their bowlers time to win the match. Vaughan and Graham Thorpe put on 116 in an hour and 45 minutes, but that was just warming up for what was to come. Amazingly, Vaughan and Andrew Flintoff put on 92 in 46 minutes, a blazing partnership that looked more like a 20/20 partnership than a Test partnership. When it was over, England had 478 runs to work with.

 

West Indies played well at the beginning of their second innings, and looked, over an hour into the 5th day, with Lara and Chanderpaul serenely moving along, like they might be able to save the match. Then came Ashley Giles' ball of his career, one which pitched into the farthest footmark from Lara's off stump and turned past the gap between his bat and pad as he came out to blast one, bowling him, and effectively ending the match. It was Giles 100th wicket in Test cricket. 95 runs later, it was all over, a spirited fightback by West Indies standards. However, the two ugly stumpings in the last 3 wickets (especially Tino Best's stumping after being goaded into charging down the pitch by Andrew Flintoff) painted a picture about the state of West Indies cricket that was worth more than a thousand words. Chanderpaul, again undefeated on 97, must have wondered why he bothered with the folly going on around him. By the end of the match, his latest streak of undefeated batting had, going back to the last match of the West Indies home season against Bangladesh, reached over 14 hours. But it was still far short of his record undefeated stand of over 25 hours against India in the West Indies home series of April-May 2002.

 

The match is instructive graphically from the point of view of fast and long partnerships.

 

 

This graph shows a comparison of the three most striking partnerships of the match. The graphical technique used is cumulative runs per over. In their first five overs together, Strauss and Key put on 18, a rate of 3.6. In their 1st 10 overs, they put on 36, again 3.6 By the 30 over mark together, they had put on 141, 4.7 per over. And so on. The Strauss-Key partnership is amazing in the fact that over 59 overs, at five over intervals, it only dipped cumulatively below 3.5 once, and was 4.5 or over for most of its second half, ending at it's highest level. The entire partnership rattled along at about 4.9 an over. This kind of batting, no matter the bowling, over a period of over 4 and a half hours, is simply phenomenal. The Gayle-Smith partnership looks a good One Day International partnership, and the Vaughan-Flintoff partnership a good 20/20 partnership. These two partnerships are shown cumulatively over by over. Gayle-Smith, while entertaining, turned out to be no more than a cameo in the context of the whole match. If Strauss-Key put the West Indies in the coffin, Vaughan-Flintoff nailed it shut. These two partnerships show that England totally dominated West Indies in both innings, doing exactly what they wished with West Indies bowling, destroying and demoralizing the attack both in the long and short run.

 

Sources for this article:
Derek Pringle--London Daily Telegraph
Tony Cozier--Barbados Daily Nation (Bridgetown)
Andrew Miller, Freddie Auld, and Liam Brickhill--Wisden Cricinfo
Wisden Cricinfo ball-by-ball commentary and Stats Guru

 

(Article: Copyright © 2004 Jack Solock)