India vs West Indies: Hosts let down by fragile batting, but rain may yet bail them out

On Day four of the second Test between West Indies and India, two outcomes were possible: The first, and still by far the most likely, was that India bowl out the hosts and win the match by an innings. The second is that rain saves the West Indies from another chastening defeat. The weather that is sitting over the Caribbean right now is pretty bleak and only an hour’s play was possible on day four. Tropical Storm Earl is hanging around the region like an uninvited house guest that won’t take a hint. The West Indies have a chance of getting out of this, but any significant play on Day five, and India will secure victory. A win for the West Indies is basically impossible — stranger things have happened, but they have gone on to be the basis of a religion. The home team need to bat for as long as they can and hope that more rain will make the task easier. Even before the day had begun on Tuesday, rain was doing its best to get the West Indies a draw, with an hour gone before the players took the field. They got 15 minutes of play before rain reappeared, causing another delay. In those 15 minutes, the hosts lost Rajendra Chandrika. [caption id=“attachment_2931594” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  West Indies’ Rajendra Chandrika (right) walks pass teammate Kraigg Brathwaite. AP[/caption] When Chandrika was bowled by Ishant Sharma off a ball that he tried to leave alone, he had scored just one run; with this dismissal, his Test average dropped to 14, the second lowest Test average by any top-order batsman in the history of West Indies cricket. Only Floyd Reifer who was drafted into the Test side during the 2009 players’ strike has a worse record. But while Reifer can boast a first-class record that includes 13 hundreds, Chandrika has one hundred and an average of 25 in first-class cricket. He has been nothing short of a walking wicket this series and while the stocks of players that are available to the West Indies Test side are limited and shrinking, the time has come for Chandrika to go away and work on his game. If he is persevered with, that second worst average of all time will become the worst. With the West Indies one down with not many on the board, they needed the obdurate Kraigg Brathwaite to hang around. He would be the rock on which this innings was built. He batted for 218 balls in the first innings at Antigua and that level of stubbornness was the minimum that his side needed. But it isn’t what they got. For the first five balls of Amit Mishra’s first over, he was on a good line and a good length and getting the ball to turn. His sixth delivery was dragged down and Brathwaite saw the chance for a boundary. It was the right shot to a poor ball but the execution was all wrong, and the ball spooned up in the air for an easy catch. While the West Indies could have expected Chandrika to go quickly, the sight of the batsman most capable of batting time getting out to a loose shot caught in the deep would have hammered the West Indies’ already fragile confidence. Any remnants of self-belief that still existed were gone when Mohammad Shami worked over Marlon Samuels. In the balls that preceeded Samuels’ dismissal, Shami got one to move back into the batsman and one away from him. The one that dismissed him came in a touch but the real issue was how low it kept. Having been pushed on to the back foot by an excellent bouncer at the start of the over, Samuels seemed reluctant to come forward and the ball clipped the top of his off-stump. Shami was brilliant in the latter half of his spell getting the ball to carry through at some pace and regularly getting alarming bounce. It was just this kind of delivery that saw the end of Darren Bravo. Throughout this curtailed day’s play, Bravo played the short ball badly. He kept fending at them with his bat away from his body. A well-directed short ball aimed at Bravo’s throat pinned him on the back foot and he gloved the ball through to third slip to leave the West Indies four wickets down and still 256 runs away from making India bat again. That three of those four wickets to fall were Brathwaite, Bravo and Samuels — the men who had the best chance of batting long enough to save the match — it was a bleak 15.5 overs before lunch for the hosts. The rain arrived during the lunch break and did not let up. That unlikely draw is still on, but no thanks to the West Indies top-order.