Cricket: Jermaine Blackwood gives West Indies hope despite absent friends

There will be a few reasons to remember this game, the first day-night Test held in England, but none of them will have anything much to do with the cricket played by West Indies. Alastair Cook batted for longer in the one innings he played than their 11 batsmen managed in 22 innings between them. On Saturday West Indies lost 19 wickets in the day. It wasn’t even spectacularly bad cricket.

There was no dramatic collapse, just a grim and inevitable subsidence. You would get a better contest watching a steamroller go over wet tarmac. This is a callow West Indies team, young to enough to learn, yes, but young enough to get scarred, too. And it is hard to believe a defeat like this will do them any good.

There was a little good news in among all the tumbling wickets. The West Indies selectors expect to be able to pick Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels in their squad for the limited-overs games that follow these three Tests. Gayle last played a one-day international in March 2015, though he made a comeback for the T20 team earlier this year.

There’s word, too, that Sunil Narine wants to commit to the ODI team before the next World Cup, although he may not play against England next month. Gayle and Samuels say they are keen to give something back to this green West Indies team, though whatever they have to offer it will not be any use in this Test series.

READ MORE: England fail to capitalise after Cook’s double century

Also on the upside Darren Bravo played a fine cameo, Denesh Ramdin scored a match-winning 20, and Sunil Narine bowled brilliantly well. Only, all that was happening 5,000 miles away in Providence, where the Guyana Amazon Warriors were playing the Trinbago Knight Riders in the Caribbean Premier League. All three of them might have been in this Test team. It would undoubtedly have been better if they were. But each has their reasons why they are not. Ramdin was dropped last year, after he made 59 and 62 in back‑to‑back innings against Australia. Narine has drifted out of Test cricket, playing the last of his six games in 2013. And then there’s Bravo.

Unlike Gayle, Samuels, and Narine, Bravo is clear that he wants to play Test cricket and unlike Ramdin there is no question he is still one of the very best Test players in the Caribbean. Only he is not in the team because the West Indies Cricket Board still has not forgiven him for describing its chairman, Dave Cameron, as “big idiot” in a tweet he sent last year. Though it is true they would be more likely too if Bravo ever apologised. Instead, he had his lawyers launch a claim against them for loss of earnings. Bravo has played 49 Tests for West Indies. No one in the team they put out at Edgbaston had played in more than 37.

All this is just one more problem for the WICB’s new management team to try and sort out. “The frustration today is that these guys have not done themselves justice,” said its new chief executive, Johnny Grave. “Ideally at the end of this I’d love two or three guys to be on the honours board at Lord’s, then we can start to say they are the future, this tour has positives, three players that can be the spine for the next 10 years.”

In this match they mustered two good performances between them. Kemar Roach bowled well but he is 29, and the oldest player in the team. Then, in their first innings Jermaine Blackwood made a spirited 79 off 76 balls.

Blackwood batted with a swagger that suggested he was not overly intimidated by England’s quicks even though they bounced him over and again. Jimmy Anderson did not concede a run all morning until Blackwood decided to lash a couple of drives away through the off side. He followed those with a couple of glorious strokes in Toby Roland-Jones’s first over, one to long-on, another to long-off. Later he swatted Roland-Jones back over his own head for four, skipped down the pitch to wallop Moeen Ali for one six, and stepped outside leg to whip Stuart Broad away for another.

In between all this Ben Stokes caught Blackwood on the helmet with a bouncer that knocked him to the ground. Back on his feet Blackwood lashed Stokes’s next delivery for four with a reproachful cut shot. England fans will remember Blackwood from the innings he played against them on the 2015 tour.

The 112 not out he made in the first Test in Antigua, a match West Indies drew, is still his only Test century, though he has played 23 games. But he is a better player than that record suggests. Maybe good enough to become one of those three players Grave wants to build a team around. And he cares a lot. Last year he went back to his old school to donate a few thousand pounds worth of cricket kit.

With it Blackwood also delivered 500 packets of instant porridge, just to help make sure the school’s players had enough to eat on match days. Which is a reminder of just how under-resourced West Indian cricket is. “The talent is there,” says Grave, and West Indies did win the last Under-19s World Cup.

But to make the most of it the WICB needs to sweet-talk Bravo back into the team, improve the West Indies’ schools, academies, and second team cricket, and design a professional setup which is going to incentivise their best players to stick at Test cricket. Which, given that they employ fewer staff than Warwickshire, is a hell of a job to take on, harder even than facing Anderson and Broad under the floodlights.