WERE it boxing, even Don King would be hard-pressed to argue its case.
The tale-of-the-tape, the statistical guide to the records of the two combatants, is so lop-sided they wouldn’t be in the same division, let alone the same ring.
One has a 13-1 win-loss record over the last 16 encounters with an 474-300 advantage in match experience. The other is in 2-9 debit over its last 15.
One has already comfortably taken the first round against opponents who have been beaten in the last two appearances at the next venue.
Yet the contest is cricket, the most unpredictable of all sports, and the second Cable & Wireless Test between the game’s current heavyweight champions, Australia, and the struggling challengers, the West Indies, starting at the Queen’s Park Oval tomorrow, cannot be entirely dismissed as a foregone conclusion.
The West Indies have been this way before, four years ago against Australia to boot.
They had just come from a 5-0 thrashing in South Africa and were dismissed for 51, still their lowest Test total, to lose by 321 runs at Queen’s Park. Yet they bounced off the canvas to take the next two rounds at Sabina Park and Kensington Oval Tests before losing the last to share the honours.
They were 1-0 down as well a year ago against India and finished up 2-1 victors.
This time they have come off defeat by the irrefutable margin of nine wickets in the first Test at Bourda last Sunday. But they were undone by bad luck, in the grotesque form of critical umpiring errors, untimely injuries and an unusual dismissal of their premier batsman, and should not expect such an adversely stacked pack again.
With such a disparity between the teams - Australia also have a 474-300 advantage in players’ Test match experience - the West Indies need at least a fair deal to be able to compete.
Already, illness has denied them their fastest bowler, Jermaine Lawson, who has gone down with chicken pox, and injury has eliminated the durable and reliable wicket-keeper Ridley Jacobs.
It means debut Tests for Lawson’s replacement, the equally fast 21-year-old firebrand, Tino Best, and 20-year-old Jamaican Carlton Baugh who remarkably joins R.K.Nunes in 1928, Ivan Barrow in the 1930s and Gerry Alexander, Jackie Hendriks and Jeffrey Dujon of more recent vintage as West Indies’ wicket-keepers from Wolmers College in Kingston.
Omari Banks, the tall, slim 20-year-old off-spinner, the first Anguillan to earn a West Indies Test cap, is likely to make it a trio of first-timers in a team with six players under the age of 24 and an overall average age of 25.
It is an overwhelming challenge against powerful and confident opposition. But, for all their misfortunes at Bourda, the West Indies showed encouraging resil-ience to compile 398 in their second innings after trailing by 252 and, at one stage on the third afternoon, bringing the contest back into even terms.
The catalyst for the revival was Brian Lara, as he was in 1999 with successive innings of 213 and 153 not out when he was in his first term of captaincy. But he was not the only one, as he was then.
His second innings 110 followed Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s dazzling, even first innings 100 and an audacious 62 by left-handed opener Devon Smith, on debut, at the start of the second innings.
He was then critically complemented in a third wicket partnership of 185 by Daren Ganga’s 113, his maiden Test hundred in his first home Test.
It was Lara’s 19th Test hundred - but none have been in his previous ten Tests and 18 innings on his home ground at Queen’s Park. It is a personally disturbing omission from his celebrated record. There is no better time to put it right.
Even if Lara does make the breakthrough, opposing captain Steve Waugh’s comment in answer to a media conference question after the first Test was pertinent. He didn’t mind Lara scoring a hundred every time, he said, so long as Australia keeps winning.
The West Indies weakness against Australian bowling diminished by the absence of the injured Glenn McGrath and the suspended Shane Warne is not batting that is strengthened by the return of Ramnaresh Sarwan.
It is unmistakably bowling that, with the exception of the veteran Vasbert Drakes, was uninspired and ineffective at Bourda.
It is too much to expect Best and Banks, two youngsters on debut, to make a significant difference.
The lead has to come from Merv Dillon whose effort in the first Test, as it has too often been, was not what a captain should expect from the only bowler in his team with more than 30 Tests and 100 wickets.
In spite of the heavy loss, there was a refreshing toughness about the West Indies at Bourda. Dillon needs to be firmly told there is no room for back-sliders and that his place depends on his endeavour over the next few days.
Trinidad, like Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean, is in the grip of its longest dry spell for 30 years. The northern range hills that form the stunning backdrop to Queen’s Park are parched and like tinder-boxes.
The irrigation sprinklers have kept the ground as a lush green oasis and repeated soaking ensured an uneven covering of grass on the pitch yesterday.
But Bryan Davis, the former West Indies opener who is cricket manager at Queen’s Park, said it is likely to open quickly and crack through the combination of the dryness and the fierce heat.
“We’ve prepared it well and it isn’t much different to what we’ve produced over the last two Tests here which both went well into the last day,” he said. “We’ve never had a fast pitch here but there will be some movement off the seam and turn and, given the current weather conditions, it will get drier as the match goes on.”
The squads: West Indies (from): Brian Lara (captain), Ramnaresh Sarwan (vice-captain), Devon Smith, Wavell Hinds, Daren Ganga, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Carlton Baugh, Vasbert Drakes, Omari Banks, Mervyn Dillon, Tino Best, Marlon Samuels, Pedro Collins, David Bernard.
Australia (from): Steve Waugh (captain), Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting, Darren Lehmann, Adam Gichrist, Brad Hogg, Andy Bichel, Brett Lee, Jason Gillespie, Stuart MacGill, Martin Love, Ashley Noffke, Michael Clarke, Brad Williams.
Umpires: Asoka de Silva (Sri Lanka), Rudi Koertzen (South Africa).