India unravel Bravo's short-ball frailty

Bowling around the wicket with two balls left for lunch, Mohammed Shami banged in as good a short ball as you will see. It was angling into Darren Bravo, rapidly cramping him for room, and took off steeply in the direction of his throat.

This was the 37th ball of Bravo's innings, and the 21st he was facing from Shami. This was the ninth ball he was facing from Shami that was short and at his body.

The previous eight had caused him all kinds of discomfort. He had fended at some of them, gloves rising instinctively to guard his face and pinging the ball away in unintended directions, often in the air, somehow missing the fielders, including a leg gully waiting for precisely that kind of thing. He had tried to pull a couple of them, and had ended up flapping in hope, with his body in no position to execute the shot properly. Again the ball had eluded the fielders.

Bravo can bat with catlike grace at times, but this wasn't his day for a ninth life. Up went his hands again, as the ninth short ball from Shami climbed at him. His feet left the ground as he tried to ride the bounce, and his bat face closed as he tried to tuck the ball into the leg side. But this ball was just too quick, just too accurate, and bounced just too awkwardly. It popped once again in an unintended direction, but this time a fielder was stationed exactly where it went, and KL Rahul took an easy catch at third slip.

Shami was clearly bowling to a plan, a recently conceived one, by the looks of it. Bravo doesn't have a reputation for discomfort against the short ball. But perhaps someone in India's camp had worked this out recently, perhaps while watching West Indies' tour of Australia at the turn of the year.

Bravo was West Indies' best-performing batsman on the tour, scoring 247 runs at 49.40 in the three-Test series, with a hundred in Hobart and an 81 in Melbourne. But in Sydney, in the rain-ravaged third Test, James Pattinson had attacked him with the short ball, not using it as often as Shami but slipping in at least one every over, and had eventually dismissed him with one; taking his eye off the ball, Bravo had top-edged a pull.

It was perhaps only the second time Bravo had been dismissed by a short ball at the body in Test cricket - Neil Wagner had got him to glove one to the wicketkeeper in Wellington, back in December 2013. But if someone in India's camp had paid attention to the Sydney Test, they might have picked up some sort of clue.

Or maybe it wasn't during this innings that they spotted something, but at some point before or after the Sydney Test. Maybe it was during a passage of play that might have looked entirely unremarkable to everyone else. Test cricketers, and coaches and analysts who work with Test teams, view the game with eyes that see far more detail than the average punter - or journalist - while quickly identifying which one is significant and which ones aren't.

The point is, no matter when it occurred to them, India had a plan against Bravo. And they executed it with precision. At no point during this series, on the other hand, have West Indies appeared to pursue a specific plan against a specific Indian batsman. Instead, they have plugged away in more generic ways, such as, most frequently, bowling outside off stump, often fairly wide of it, and trying to induce an error. On the second day, they tried this all morning against Cheteshwar Pujara, and he simply refused to bite. India enjoyed a wicketless session, even if their scoring was kept in check.

The possibility of Bravo having a weakness against the short ball wasn't widely known before this series, or even before this Test match. Most international teams, however, have been bowling at Pujara's stumps for at least the last year-and-a-half; they know he has excellent judgment of his off stump and infinite patience outside it, but they also know he occasionally leaves a gap between bat and pad.

Judging by how West Indies bowled to him, they didn't know this. Either they hadn't done their homework, or they had a dossier full of plans for each Indian batsmen but simply hadn't been able to execute them.

Over the course of the series, India have shown themselves to be far ahead of this West Indies side in pretty much every department. Shami's clinical dismantling of Bravo, West Indies' most accomplished Test batsman, only reinforced the extent of their superiority.