West Indies win the mind games
Siddhartha Talya
25-Feb-2013
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The thriller in Port-of-Spain defied the behaviour of the pitch and delivered a fitting end to the series, writes Vic Marks in his blog in the Guardian.
The pitch did not change that much yesterday but the match situation did – deliciously. Criticisms of this surface or the one in Barbados should not be swept away amid the excitement of a Test match, which briefly wobbled from moribund to mesmerising on the final afternoon.
Cricket becomes fascinating when the mind games begin, when each side can either scent an unlikely victory or fear the worst. Then the brain starts to play its tricks. We were in this territory after lunch yesterday.
The series triumph was long overdue for West Indies, writes Tony Cozier in the Independent, and the tactics, despite the criticisms, justified the end result.
It regained the Wisden Trophy they [West Indies] once securely held for 27 years, but which has been in England's equally firm grip since 2000. In those nine years, they had not won a single Test against their oldest opponents and had endured a raft of humiliations – a two-day defeat at Headingley in 2004, all-out totals of 47, 54, 61 and 94.
The outcome of the series, however it was achieved, has put such memories behind them. There have been unmistakable signs that the fight, so glaringly missing for so long, is returning. It was put to the test time and again over the past six weeks and, even as they collapsed on a wearing pitch, it was evident yesterday.
Stephen Brenkley, writing in the Independent, says the Trinidad Test was not deserving of the thrilling climax given the way it had progressed for the first four days, but that in itself summed up Test cricket's endless possibilities.
Chris Gayle's tactics courted disaster, writes Michael Atherton in the Times, but in the end, England, despite their superb fight on the final day, had themselves to blame for their failure to win the Test.
Jonathan Agnew, in his column on the BBC website, writes about what the outcome means for the England team and what it needs to get right ahead of the return series in May.
Siddhartha Talya is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo