Combining style and steel

There was a reason why the West Indies were everybody's favourite other team during the eighties. Obviously success led to a colossal bandwagon - everybody loves a winner - but it was really the spectacle they provided that drew everyone in. The batsmen played shots all of us dreamed of playing, their bowlers bowled at speeds we dreamed of reaching, their fielders were as lean, athletic and adept at pouching spectacular catches as we dreamed of being. The whole package was just too damned attractive, regardless of result.

Clearly, times have changed but some basic ingredients remain. Jerome Taylor is an example; no matter how strong the pull of the basketball dollar in the Caribbean, at least one genuine fast bowler somehow always lurks. Athletic fielders are not hard to find as Dwayne Bravo proved, they're still capable of plucking stunning catches. And Chris Gayle is the kind of batsman whose shots we regularly drool over. The quantity of such players produced may have receded, possibly even the quality, but as a team you'd still pay to watch them.

Being good to watch and being good are two different things of course, as West Indian fans - and even Pakistani ones - know only too well. Beefing up natural flair with some unglamorous discipline has never been more in vogue in team sport than it is now; this year's football world cup proved it with the rise of the defensive midfielder, the kind of player Eric Cantona called the water-carrier. These are the men who don't make the hair on your arms stand up, yet they compensate for natural showboating inclinations by getting the little things in sport right. Even in the greatest West Indian side, there was a Larry Gomes. It's just as well then that this West Indian side has Corey Collymore and Daren Ganga, workhorse and stoic, as foil to the Taylors and the Gayles.

Taylor was the headline this morning, ridding an Inzamam-ul-Haq-sized thorn from the West Indian side with a ball deserving a high-profile victim. He also removed the tail to end with a five-wicket haul: a fitting statistic for a future star. But it was Collymore, poor, luckless Corey, who has beaten more outside edges than any in this series, who had to take care of the dirty work, dismissing the less glamorous but potentially pesky Shoaib Malik and Kamran Akmal. And despite a lack of rhythm early on, it was he who strangled Pakistan, dot ball after dot ball, maiden after maiden. Less bling-bling than Fidel Edwards, whose pace accompanied Taylor's at Lahore, he may be but Collymore was the more effective partner.

Given the choice most people would pay to watch Gayle rather than Ganga. He's the man murdering bowlers, a steady stream of audacious shots from a stance so wide he might be straddling a horse at the ready. He was less bullying when the West Indies began their reply, to the extent that Ganga kept pace with him till tea. Settled in thereafter, he began to speed away and by day's end stood 28 runs further from 14 fewer balls. He was 13 short of a first hundred in 12 Tests, the headlines already his.

Ganga, meanwhile, steady as they come, might get a subheading, a solid eighth Test fifty from an unfashionably slow strike rate: at 33, it's more 1950s Hanif Mohammad then 2000s Virender Sehwag. But in no way should it detract from the quality of his batting, or its worth. The strike rate suggests doggedness but it never appeared so. His driving, through covers, is quite the thing of beauty, a very correct and text-bookish splendour. So too are his shots in defence. It's just that in the age of limited overs, where unorthodoxy and improvisation is master, it can become easy to overlook an old-fashioned approach to batting.

It is proving, in tandem with Gayle, a valuable approach. Their unbroken 151-run stand was the highest for an opening West Indian pair in Pakistan, their fifth century stand together in 37 innings and on average, they put on only a little less than Greenidge and Haynes did. It's no comparison of course, for the latter pair did so over a much longer period, but in terms of aggregate runs Gayle and Ganga are now on the cusp of becoming the second-highest scoring opening pair in West Indian history. Ganga's career makes for shoddy, interrupted reading and Gayle is still not where he is expected to be. But West Indies' troubles in replacing Greenidge-Haynes have been almost as severe as Pakistan's. In that light, the combination, and Ganga's role within it, is not to be undervalued.