MERV DILLON and Marlon Samuels yesterday paid with their West Indies places for their slovenly performances in the first two Tests against Australia.
Both were dropped for the third Test starting at Kensington Oval today, to be replaced by two young debutants.
Fast bowler Dillon, the only one in the squad with over 100 Test wickets, makes way for Tino Best after managing only five wickets for 324 runs in the first two Tests.
The pacy, 21-year-old Barbadian was the leading wicket-taker in last season’s Carib Beer Series with 39 at an average of 18.25, impressing with his speed and his dynamism, if not with beamers that twice had him banned from bowling.
His inclusion will delight an expectant home crowd at what West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) officials report will be a packed, holiday Kensington crowd.
The talented Samuels, whose casual approach has led to three soft dismissals in four innings and a crucial missed catch, is replaced by the tall off-spinning all-rounder Omari Banks who becomes the first Anguillan Test cricketer at the age of 20.
Left-hander Shivnarine Chanderpaul, scorer of Test cricket’s third fastest hundred in the first Test at Bourda, is back to add substance and experience to the middle order after recovering from the knee injury that kept him out of the second Test.
Fast bowler Jermaine Lawson, 21, also returns after his absence from the second Test following a bout of chicken pox.
He and Best form the quickest West Indies pair since Curtly Ambrose and Patrick Patterson shared the new ball against the 1991 Australians but have only Vasbert Drakes’ controlled fast-medium movement and Banks’ untried off-spin in support - not Malcolm Marshall and Courtney Walsh as in 1991.
The third man missing from the Port-of-Spain Test, the established and reliable wicket-keeper Ridley Jacobs, yesterday failed a fitness test on the groin muscle he pulled in the first Test.
Carlton Baugh, the little 20-year-old Jamaican who made his debut in the second Test in Port-of-Spain, is retained on the ground where he scored an unbeaten 100 for West Indies ‘B’ against champions Barbados in the Carib Beer Series.
With Best and Banks on debut, Baugh in his second Test, left-handed opener Devon Smith in his third and eight players under the age of 25, it remains as young and inexperienced a team as it was in Port-of-Spain in spite of five changes.
Australia, whose victories in the first two Tests guaranteed the retention of the Frank Worrell Trophy, are expected to make only one change to the victorious eleven from Bourda and Queen’s Park.
Glenn McGrath, their premier fast bowler with 422 wickets from 91 Tests, returns to spearhead the attack after missing the first two tests to be with his ill wife in Austrralia.
Left-arm wrist-spinner Brad Hogg makes way, leaving McGrath, three other fast bowlers (the fiery Brett Lee, Jason Gillespie and Andy Bichel) and leg-spinner Stuart MacGill as the attack.
The West Indies face another tough examination against opponents who start with a couple of prime incentives.
Australia need two more victories to become the first team to complete a clean sweep of a Test series in the Caribbean since the West Indies were granted the status in 1928.
Australia, with a 3-0 triumph in five Tests on their initial tour in 1955, remain the only team ever to have won more than two Tests here.
Steve Waugh, who led them to a 5-0 whitewash over the West Indies in the 2000-01 series in Australia, has a personal milestone over the next two Tests. He is within two matches of overtaking the win record of Clive Lloyd, who led the West Indies to 36 in his 74 Tests between 1974 and 1985.
Waugh, whose first series at the helm was on Australia’s previous West Indies tour in 1999, has presided over 35 victories.
The question to captain Brian Lara at yesterday’s media conferfence was straightforward, the answer obvious enough that even Asoka deSilva might have recognised it.
What, he was asked, would the West Indies have to do to win?
“We’ve got to play good cricket, we’ve got to win a few more sessions,” came the reply. “We’ve been winning one session, they’ve been winning two. We’ve got to command a day’s cricket and put them on the back foot.”
In each of the first two defeats at Bourda, by nine wickets, and the Queen’s Park Oval, by 118 runs, the West Indies have been playing catch-up.
They have not been able to in spite of otherwise competitive totals of 398 in the second innings in Georgetown and 408 in the first in Port-of-Spain and two hundreds by Daren Ganga and one each by Lara and Chanderpaul.
Lara made another salient point.
“You’ve got to take into consideration we’re taking on the world’s best in both Tests and one-day internationals and they’re not going to let up,” he said. “They not many loopholes in their cricket so we’ve got to play good, hard consistent cricket in each and every single session.”
The fact is that the last time the West Indies won every session of a Test against Australia - and won the match by 10 wickets - was nine Tests ago, at Sabina Park in the last series in the Caribbean in 1999.
Lara scored 213, the first of his three famous hundreds, and batted through the entire second day with Jimmy Adams to build a lead of 175.
It was the next Test, also at Kensington, that Lara on his own proved that Test matches, like horse races and general elections, can be won in spite of faltering beginnings.
His unbeaten 153 on the last day earned the West Indies their one-wicket victory, the most pulsating day’s cricket Kensington has ever witnessed.
Along with Lara’s present form (26, 110, 91 and 122) and the prospect of watching a champion batsman in combat against the most lethal attack of the day, it is the primary reason for the sell-out that is anticipated.
Lara’s confrontation with Lee’s searing pace during his flawless, breathtaking second innings in Port-of-Spain is still fresh in the memory.
Those with the probing accuracy of Glenn McGrath, who has claimed his wicket 13 times and who now returns after missing the first two Tests, go back to 1995 and will linger forever.
But, as was obvious in Port-of-Spain, he cannot do it alone.