Sad Stats

The West Indies-Australia series has largely passed me by. When it's been on I've usually either been watching live cricket here in England or at work.

A few things have seeped through though, such as the excellence of Lee and Chanderpaul, Stuart MacGill's retirement, and the fact that, certainly in Antigua over the last few days, there's been nobody watching. Although there are fragile signs that the chasm between the two sides is narrowing, the series just doesn't seem to have the vibrancy that either the 2003 or, obviously, the 1999 one did. The absence of Lara doesn't help, but when you turn on the TV and find an apparently large ground like the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium virtually deserted there doesn't seem to be the same incentive to follow the action.

Something I hadn't noticed, which Rob at Cricket Forever points out is the fact that the West Indies went into the last Test with a specialist opener, Xavier Marshall, with a highest first-class score of just 82 and an average in the mid-twenties. The latter may not be unprecedented but the former sure feels like it.

If ever the sad decline of the West Indies can be summed up in a single statistic, that is it.