Australia tour of the Caribbean, May 27-June 15

[mikesiva]

Hope is gone...in more ways than one.

Sorry Mike.

what can I say? Sigh...no heroics from holder this time around.

ramdin out for 29...eight down.

[from_the_stands]

The most timid performance from a West Indies team I've ever seen. Englandesque.

[yuppie]

Every bowler gets some wickets.

What can WI do?

Australia still have many questions ahead of the ashes

[andy]

pathetic from the windies batting line up again...but the OZ bowling attack is scarily good

[andy]

pathetic from the windies batting line up again...but the OZ bowling attack is scarily good

[GarlicJam]

Telling sentence at the end of the Cricinfo report on the match:

West Indies had lost 20 wickets in 101.5 overs in the Test.

[yuppie]

So was the selections wrong for the Windies? Or is this what the future holds for west indian cricket at test level?

[dan08]

So was the selections wrong for the Windies? Or is this what the future holds for west indian cricket at test level?

I'm not sure what Chandrika was doing there but the other squad members seem to be the best West Indies have at the moment. Bowling looks fine but i can't see their batting line up making 300 too often.

[mikesiva]

Quite right, dan...the future of West Indian Test cricket batting does not look particularly bright....

But, hey, there's always T20 cricket!

[sussexpob]

Kind of ironic that last month there was positivity about the future, and now Windies get blasted by the best team in the world and everyone wants to talk about how bad they are again.

This series was always going to be about taking away positives, and there have been positives with the ball for the windies. They cant keep on accepting mediocrity from the likes of Ramdin though, a team with a brittle batting line up cant afford a specialist keeper, one who isn't even that good. He must be one of the most fortune players in history to have played so often and captained a side despite looking to be of the quality.

I hazard a guess that condition of pitches makes batting difficult in the Caribbean, they seem to either be pitches that are terrible to score on, or pitches that you expect to score 700 on and draw. Those conditions don't make players with good technique stand out, you either have top orders copping unplayable balls, or players who are bad scoring mega runs on dead pitches despite their lack of technique.

If you play the majority of cricket on surfaces that favour bowlers, you are also not having players play in a way that they are setting up to score big scores. They probably either think "time to be aggressive" and try and score too quickly because they know they are getting on with their name on it, or they play normally and do get one with their name on it.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Steve Smith now top ranked batter after this series.

[The Waugh Twins]

Steve Smith now top ranked batter after this series.

It's hard to believe when you watch him bat. He does so many things wrong and yet. It must bug the hell out of Boycott, "there must be no gap between bat and pad", my first and only book I ever used to learn the art of batting written by Boycott.Wow times have past.