PERTH 1997

Nasty, Brutish and Short

Want to believe? It would have taken a brave West Indian fan to trust anyone after the fiasco at Adelaide Oval. Nonetheless, on a Perth pitch no-one liked the look of and in an atmosphere noone liked the sound of, Brian Lara’s team took only three days to mangle Mark Taylor’s Australians by 10 wickets, closing their hosts’ margin of series victory to 3–2. The co-conspirators, as ever, were Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, who ignored groin and hamstring strains to bowl at speeds that bordered on the supernatural.

The game’s biggest mystery was how its pitch, once as hard and flat as marble, ended up like crazy paving. Portentous cracks on the first morning had by the third day, in airless, forty-degree heat, come to resemble ugly surgical scars. But the association was saved further scrutiny by the brevity of the match, and the elongated inquests into ill feeling between the sides, touched off by Lara’s claims that the Australians picked-on opener Robert Samuels, and Taylor’s counterclaims that Lara was ‘an antagonist’. This tit-for-tat tittle-tattle culminated when Lara, a provocative choice as runner to Walsh on the last morning, collided with close fielder Matt Hayden and went down like Diego Maradona looking for a penalty: which perhaps he was, although referee Peter van der Merwe levied no fines. The umpires Willey and Hair then did something that umpires might profitably do more often: called both captains into conclave, and asked them to calm their teams. The game proceeded after a perfunctory but meaningful handshake.

Ambrose bowled wonderfully from the first on a pitch tailored for his talents. Hayden’s loose defensive shot to the match’s third ball arced to slip, and Taylor’s ruinous run continued courtesy of Chanderpaul, who leapt left to arrest a screaming square drive at point then hit the stumps from his supine position: a superstitious man might by now have begun to imagine conspiracy theories. Mark Waugh and Michael Bevan added 110 between lunch and tea with panache and pluck, but a rehydrated Ambrose expunged Waugh, Healy and Reiffel in twenty minutes after the interval, and Bishop quelled the rest. Both bowlers looked all the better for some thoughtful captaincy: Ambrose bowled his 18 overs in seven spells, Bishop his 18 in nine.

A troubled start to the West Indies’ reply seemed to ease when Warne initiated a ball change, and Lara finally endowed summer with a Test century – his eighth, and first in seventeen months. Making up for in mettle what he lacked in method, the reinstated Samuels lasted five-and-a-half hours, although three minutes of this was consumed by the third umpire in deliberating on a direct hit run-out that no racing steward could have separated. Tempers frayed in the enervating heat, McGrath becoming fractious with Samuels and Warne with Hooper, though the only censure they incurred was Lara’s, who accused the Worrell Trophy custodians of ‘rubbing it in’ – something which used to be a West Indian prerogative. Otherwise, Lara kept his cool by hitting 90 in boundaries, and at one stage 26 in 14 Warne deliveries; the second new ball did not put down the insurrection until the visitors’ lead was 141 on a pitch now playing at wildly varying altitudes. Ambrose sounded the Australian retreat, blowing the captain away with a lifter, and tunnelling beneath Blewett with a shooter. Walsh then rose from the treatment table to dismiss the Waughs in consecutive overs after lunch, and only a few tail-end strokes followed Hayden’s failure to offer, the West Indies’ final chase needing no more than three-quarters of an hour.

Despite the compression of play, the Test produced enough paranormal phenomena to merit investigation by Agents Scully and Mulder. Walsh batted with a runner, then bowled 20 overs for 5 wickets – shades of Kapil Dev, 1981. Shane Warne bowled a bouncer to Lara – shades of Phil Edmonds, 1983. Australia’s Adelaide match-winner Bevan barely bowled – shades of Allan Border, 1989. Ambrose was run out on the third morning by Healy’s back-handed flick, his bat having lodged in one of the pitch’s crevices; his valedictory over then took 15 deliveries – two more than Gubby Allen’s infamous Old Trafford over in 1934. In all, in fact, the series was swollen by 43 overs of illegitimate deliveries: West Indies 147 no balls and 20 wides; Australia 88 no balls and 3 wides. It was the West Indies’ fifth consecutive WACA win, and the fourth in the last ten Worrell Trophy matches to finish inside three days: a comment on the quality of their pace bowling and the inadequacy of pitch preparation, or perhaps defensive frailties revealed and attention spans shortened by one-day cricket. Take your pick. The truth is out there.

Test Match Year 1996–97