You want West Indies to be good at Test cricket? You want them to win matches consistently and not just a one-off Test victory every now and then? Then give them regular opportunities to play more Tests. Otherwise, it is very difficult to expect them to perform when they get to play Test series every six months. That is how West Indies captain Kraigg Brathwaite put in a nutshell the predicament of his inexperienced Test team and why the visitors lost the Richards-Botham Trophy 3-0 to England.
This is the second Test series Brathwaite's team had played so far this year, having drawn the two-match series in Australia in January. Though several players featured in the domestic four-day West Indies Championship between February and mid-April, only a few had any real experience of English conditions by the time West Indies arrived in July for the Test series. A three-day warm-up match against the ECB's County Select XI at Beckenham, which was affected by a rain on a slower pitch, was their only preparation ahead of the Lord's Test.
Undercooked and underprepared, that was the general theme that underpinned West Indies' plight this series. Brathwaite, though, said he was "excited" to look ahead with West Indies playing South Africa in a two-Test home series, which starts in Trinidad from August 7. "I'm very excited that we have two Test matches in a week's time because we need more cricket," Brathwaite said at the post-match presentation on Sunday afternoon. "Being in this competitive and this intense international game, when you are playing it more against good players, you will improve. [When Test series are] being spaced six months apart, it's kind of tough."
But the counter to Brathwaite came from his team's head coach, Andre Coley, who believed to get more matches West Indies would need to justify their "case" by winning more. "The Catch-22 is: to get more matches they [West Indies] need to be performing in the matches that you do get for some kind of case to be made about increasing the number of matches," Coley said afterwards.
Coley did, however, point out that West Indies would need better preparation ahead of Test series, especially through a combination of more practice matches to allow his players to get a better understanding of the local conditions. "For the matches that we do have, it's really an opportunity for us to be the best that we can and then potentially look at how we lead into Test matches, if there's an opportunity for us to maybe have more [warm-up] matches in that particular environment, if it's foreign to us, or engage in more bilateral discussions where these things can be facilitated."
However, both captain and coach were on the same page in their immediate review of why West Indies lost to England. While Coley said they could have "competed better", Brathwaite said West Indies lacked "discipline" in every facet thus restricting them to being "good in phases" but not for long stretches of a game.
"[Our] discipline altogether wasn't good," Brathwaite said. The blame lay with both batters and bowlers, he said.
After the second day's play at Lord's, Jayden Seales, who won the West Indies Player-of-the-Series award with 13 wickets, said it was "frustrating to look at the scoreboard" because his batters had failed in both innings which eventually cost them the first Test. Though the batters came good at Trent Bridge in the second Test, with Kavem Hodge scoring his maiden century, Brathwaite blamed the bowlers for not being "as good" as they were "supposed to be" in the first innings and the team for fluffing catches.
At Edgbaston, West Indies' bowlers failed to create any sustained pressure after reducing England to 54 for 5, allowing them to post 376 in their first innings. While there were some good spells, there never seemed any structured plan to dominate or restrict the England batters. By the time Mark Wood and Ben Stokes combined to pull the guillotine, West Indies were defeated in mind and body language, in front of a cheering full house.
Why did the bowlers fail to impose themselves? "Really and truly we weren't as consistent as you need to be," Brathwaite said. "If you look back, the guys [England batters] scored a lot of runs square of the wicket. You want to be hitting top of off stump. We didn't hit that area long enough. You had some decent pitches in the second and third Tests and if you have a good pitch you pretty much are going to score on both sides.
"It wouldn't always be easy to control it and obviously when you are playing against good batsmen, you give them momentum. So one thing you have got to do is get back to where we were in Australia: you look at the percentages and where we pitched the ball there - consistently on that top of off stump. We weren't there consistently throughout this series and that put a lot of pressure on controlling the run rate."
Coley, too, agreed, saying that after picking up three wickets on the first evening, if England were bowled out under 300, West Indies could have had "some kind of lead" but it was "definitely a missed opportunity".
"There's history around the series," he said. "The fact that we had the trophy and now pretty much turned it over with a young emerging side, there would've been a lot said about this being a walkover. Obviously, we should have competed better, but we did show a lot of fight during the series."
West Indies, Coley pointed out, were not exactly going home empty handed. There were some takeaways and as an example he presented the case of Mikyle Louis, who became the first player from St Kitts and Nevis to play Tests for West Indies, making his debut at Lord's and completing his Test initiation with a maiden fifty at Edgbaston, having faced among the fastest spells of extreme pace bowling from Wood at Trent Bridge first and then again in the third Test.
Coley said that Louis, 23, was brave, but importantly the England experience would teach him a lot. "I can remember having a conversation with Louis about Mark Wood, about playing back home first-class cricket where potentially maybe 10, 20 people in the stands [watching] versus 20,000 people in the stands [in England] and then the uproar when the bowler comes in. So definitely, it is a steep learning curve for him and the other battles.
"That's the game. You keep learning. There were instances as you would've seen or able to recall in the second Test or even here where we really stood up to that and played pretty well. So it's really about replicating that and having, for me, within this squad a certain level of bravery to be able to stand up to that and expect that this is the level of cricket that you are at, but at the same time, it's not beyond you. Just being positive and having as much common sense as possible."