Editorial | Rescuing West Indies batting

An article a week ago on the cricket website Cricinfo.com by Greg Chappell, the great Australian batsman of the 1970s and ‘80s, should be required reading for the board and administrators of Cricket West Indies (CWI).

Mr Chappell’s piece should have relevance, and even greater urgency for this lot, if they were indeed genuine in their praise of Garfield Sobers, the greatest cricketer who ever lived, who died in July, just shy of his 90th birthday. Sir Garry possessed immense natural talent, which underpinned his genius in every aspect of the game. But he sharpened and actualised those gifts the only way possible: by playing cricket. Plenty of it.

Mr Chappell’s article is about the art of batting, and especially what it takes to be a good batter in the longer format of the game, facing high-quality bowling, especially pace. That talent has to be honed through time at the crease, in match conditions, preferably ahead of Test matches.

Mr Chappell began his analysis of the physiological, mental and geometric components of batting by dissecting the varying elements from the perspective of the batter facing a bowler operating at, say, 145 kilometres (90 mph) per hour.

COMPLEX CALCULATIONS

That doesn’t just demand courage. It involves complex calculations and split-second decision-making.

He explained: “When a bowler releases the ball at that speed - roughly 40 metres per second, and the distance between release and the batter is about 19 metres – the ball arrives in approximately 0.5 seconds. The true decision window is narrower still. Human reaction time, the period required for a stimulus to reach the brain, be processed, and trigger a muscular response, is roughly 0.2 seconds. That leaves the batter a mere 0.2 or 0.3 seconds to identify the trajectory, calculate the bounce, and execute a movement. Wait until the ball has travelled halfway down the pitch to decide your stroke and you have already failed. The interception point is a moving target that must be predicted.”

So, the batter cannot depend on eyesight alone to track the ball and make a decision on how to react to it. The calculation often begins before the ball leaves the bowler’s hand.

“Batting, in other words, is an immense challenge of cognitive and physical coordination – a discipline of complex calculations and decision-making that takes many innings to develop,” Chappell wrote. “In the fraction of a second that the ball is in flight, a batter must decide whether to play it or leave it, go forward or back, attack or defend. If his mental processes are not robust and well trained, his chance of repeated success is minimal.”

He raised this issue in the context of the recent poor performance of Australian batters in Tests, and marked it as a growing symptom of insufficient practice in longer-format games, and of the division of the country’s inter-state competition into two periods to accommodate the T20 competition, Big Bash Cricket.

Mr Chappell pointed out that many of Australia’s most gifted players, with the talent and temperament who would have averaged between 20 and 30 more runs per innings in an earlier era, had in the last two to three years averaged only in the 30s in Tests.

NOT ENOUGH OPPORTUNITY

The explanation, in large part, is that Test matches are being squeezed between shorter-form games, and batters are not having enough opportunity in domestic and other competitions to spend time at the crease to develop and expand their craft.

“Batting is a lower-body-driven skill: footwork is what puts a player in position to hit the ball in the middle of the bat, delivery after delivery,” Mr Chappell pointed out. “Power-hitting is primarily an upper-body exercise - a strong, stationary base and minimal footwork are what let you swing the arms hard and launch the ball high.”

Mr Chappell’s observations about Australia are even more acute in the West Indies, where the Test batting averages of today’s leading players tend to be in the low 30s and 20s.

Kraigg Brathwaite, the region’s most consistent Test batsman in recent years, with 10 centuries in 100 Tests, averages 32.51. Justin Greaves, who has played 18 Tests since 2024 and is one of the hopes for contemporary regional batting, averages 33.5.

Viewing West Indian batting over the span of the last 25 years, even after the heyday of the regional team, the genius Brian Lara averaged 53.17; Shivnarine Chanderpaul, 51.37; Chris Gayle, 40.1 in Tests; and Ramnaresh Sarwan, 40.01.

This decline in batting, even relative to other countries, is reflected in Test match outcomes. Of their last 51 Tests over 20 series, the West Indies lost 25, or 49 per cent, of their matches. They won 12, or 23.5 per cent. The deterioration in foundational techniques is also apparent in ODIs, when top-order batters, especially, are required to structure their innings in matches in which each team bats 50 overs. Good players can transfer those skills to upper-body batting.

The opportunity to play regularly in English county cricket was lost to West Indies players, and the limited long-format regional competition was severely reduced this year because CWI could not finance it.

Cricket in the Caribbean is a public good. This newspaper again insists that it needs a different conversation for its rescue.