West Indies offer little respite

Partab Ramchand

May 17, 2002

"I am an astrologer, but I am not predicting," was Srinivas Venkataraghavan's guarded comment on the eve of the Indian tour of the West Indies in 1989. The former Indian captain was now the manager of the squad, and he had been asked for his views on the team's chances.

Looking back on the tour 13 years later, it is difficult to believe that any other result was possible. The West Indies, despite the retirement over the last few years of stars like Clive Lloyd, Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Michael Holding and Larry Gomes, were still the leading team in the world. Players like Richie Richardson, Carl Hooper, Gus Logie, Keith Arthurton, Curtly Ambrose, Ian Bishop and Courtney Walsh had stepped in to effectively breach the gap created by the exit of the stalwarts. Besides, experienced superstars like Vivian Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Malcolm Marshall and Jeff Dujon were still very much around.

With their abysmal record abroad, the Indians became the proverbial lambs to the slaughter. Little went right for them. Both the batting and bowling presented problems, and teamwork and the fighting spirit were missing. Dilip Vengsarkar lacked the leadership qualities to inspire the side, compounding the unhappy scenario by his uncharitable comments against his teammates in a magazine interview towards the end of the tour.

What was left to savour, then, were a few individual performances, but these were hardly enough to test the home team, who romped home by margins of eight wickets, 217 runs and seven wickets after the rainaffected first Test at Georgetown ended in a draw. Indeed, there was play only on the first two days of the game, making it the worst affected by weather in the Caribbean side's history.

Over the next three Tests, the Indians encountered the full weight of the West Indian supremacy. The home batsmen scored runs handsomely, while the bowlers gave the Indians a torrid time. Players of the calibre and experience of Mohammad Azharuddin, Kapil Dev, Arun Lal and Vengsarkar were sitting ducks for the pace attack of Marshall, Bishop, Walsh and Ambrose. On the faster and bouncier tracks, they were shocking failures, lacking both the guts and technique required to counter the fiery pace of the quartet.

The three exceptions were Navjot Singh Sidhu, Sanjay Manjrekar and Ravi Shastri. To an extent, the trio displayed courage and the right temperament, and each was rewarded with a Test hundred which, given the strong opposition, was a commendable feat. In addition, Sidhu, by getting 286 against Jamaica, registered the highest first-class score by an Indian outside India, surpassing Polly Umrigar's 252 not out compiled against Cambridge University in 1959.

If the batting lacked fight, the bowling, woefully inadequate, was unable to withstand the might of the West Indian batting. Kapil ploughed a lonely furrow, as his figures of 18 wickets at 21.50 apiece will testify. Arshad Ayub, in his own restrictive way, was fairly effective. The Hyderabad off-spinner was rewarded for his toil with two five-wicket hauls.

Chetan Sharma and Ravi Shastri, however, could make no impression, while Narendra Hirwani was the biggest disappointment of the tour. The bespectacled leg-spinner had come to the Caribbean with a high reputation. Not only had he set a world record by taking 16 for 136 on his Test debut against the same opponents at Madras a little over a year earlier, he also had a total haul of 36 wickets in his first four Tests.

But in the three Tests he played, Hirwani was simply blasted out of shape, illustrated by his figures of six wickets at 57.50 apiece. Richards had promised revenge after the humiliation the West Indies had suffered at the hands of Hirwani on an under-prepared Chepauk pitch, saying, "I have a long memory, maan." At the end of the series, there was little doubt that he had exacted it in style.

To some extent, the Indians were handicapped when vice captain Krishnamachari Srikkanth was hit on the right hand by a ball from Bishop in the final one-day international, played just before the first Test. The sickening blow resulted in a broken bone, necessitating the withdrawal of the swashbuckling opening batsman from the rest of the tour. Given his capacity to counter-attack the fastbowling threat in his own inimitable buccaneering manner, Srikkanth having to miss the Test series was a major blow for the Indians. However, the reasoning that he would have made a marked difference to the final result must be open to doubt.

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