IT was no wonder the West Indies were so consistently playing catch up during the Test series against Australia and that when they finally did at the ARG last Tuesday morning they had to amass Test cricket’s record winning total.
Their inexperienced and ineffective bowling and the inert pitches were a destructive enough combination. But when missed catches, botched run-outs and generally slack fielding were added to the equation it was little wonder that Australia had totals of 489, 576 for four declared, 605 for nine declared and 417 in successive Tests.
West Indian fielders let 20 catches go to ground and wasted a bundle of run-out chances.
No team with such limitations can expect to properly compete against opponents with two batsmen in the first six averaging over 50 and three others in the high 40s.
The list was long and instructive. Here are the ones that hurt most.
In the second Test at the Queen’s Park Oval, Merv Dillon squandered a clear run out chance when Darren Lehmann was 17 of his first innings 160.
A little later, Ricky Ponting edged Dillon straight to first slip where Marlon Samuels dropped him. He was then 37. He proceeded to score 206.
At Kensington, Justin Langer was dropped off Jermaine Lawson’s first ball of the Test and by Lawson off his own bowling at 4. He made 76.
Ponting was 88 of his 113 when his head-high cut to point off Tino Best was dropped by Shivnarine Chanderpaul.
Steve Waugh offered chances at 11, 67 and 85 in compiling 115, his record 30th Test hundred.
When 12 out of his Test best 71, Andy Bichel hit back a hard, head-high return that Lawson let burst through his hands.
At the ARG, Chris Gayle put down a straightforward chance off Dillon at first slip when Langer was 14. His 42 was top-score in Australia’s 240. Waugh’s 41 was next best. It should have been no more than 17 as Chanderpaul put him down at leg-slip off Omari Banks.
In the second innings, Matthew Hayden was 47 on his way 177 when Brian Lara missed a catch at slip off Banks that was as easy as they come.
There were many more that were not as costly in terms of runs but did as much damage to the morale of the suffering bowlers and the overall confidence of the team.
The repeated failure to throw down the stumps, even from close range, the several fumbles and the ease with which the Australians gathered runs to flat-footed fielders were indicative of a lack of basic technique and lapses in concentration than are often the consequence of unfitness.
Nor is it a new phenomenon.
The World Cup campaign was undermined by a piece of rank slackness against New Zealand that led to the vital miss of a regulation catch and by 20 minutes of careless ground fielding against Sri Lanka.
In two Tests against Pakistan in Sharjah in February 2002, the West Indies dropped 17 catches - s-e-v-e-n-t-e-e-n. Of course, they were beaten in both.
Even the fearsome attacks of the 1980s would have been hard-pressed to dismiss the opposition had they had to put up with such an appalling lack of support.
Instead, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall and the rest thrived not simply because they were great bowlers but because they could rest assured that their catches would be taken and their runs saved.
The ironic part is that the two most recent coaches, Roger Harper and Gus Logie, were two of the most outstanding fielders in those teams, Harper arguably the best of them all.
Yet it is a fallacy to suppose that they can transform their present charges into Roger Harpers and Gus Logies overnight.
They themselves and others of the past and present who have made their names as fielders extraordinaire - Learie Constantine, Colin Bland, Jonty Rhodes, Herschelkle Gibbs - have done so through practice, practice and more practice from the time they started the game.
It is a formula that appears to have been ignored by coaches who are responsible for getting young players ready for their progression into youth and “A” teams. In handing out its coaching certificates at various levels, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has to remind them that fielding is as integral a part of the game as batting and bowling.
When the bowling is weak, as the West Indies’ is now, it becomes even more critical.
The most fitting example Logie can follow when he prepares his team for the tours of Zimbabwe and South Africa was set by the South African team to Australia in 1952-53 under the captaincy of Jack Cheetham when fielding was low among Test teams’ list of priorities.
The South Africans were so lightly regarded that it was thought the series would be a financial disaster and was almost called off.
Cheetham recognised his team’s limitations, especially the bowling, and recognised as well that it would be immeasurably stronger if it held whatever half chances came its way and cut off the runs that would flow from the bats of Neil Harvey, Arthur Morris, Lindsay Hassett, Keith Miller and others.
He instititued a rigorous fitness and fielding practice regime, sometimes six hours a day to the exclusion of batting and bowling.
It gave a team of no-hopers hope and the results were astonishing. Half chances, and some that were hardly chances at all, were held and runs saved. The upshot was that they held the Australians, then as now the best in the world, 2-2.
It is an approach that could have the same effect on a young West Indies, strong in batting but with bowling that needs all the support it can get from its fielders.