Wagner exposes Windies' short-ball frailties

A few weeks ago Jamaica played the Leeward Islands at Basseterre in the fourth round of the regional Professional Cricket League (PCL). The Jamaican bowling attack consisted of two fast bowlers and three spinners, besides other part-time spinners.

Jamaica won the game, scoring 342 and 191, as opposed to the 232 and 144 scored by the Leewards. Of the 19 wickets Jamaica captured during the game (one player was absent hurt) only two fell to seam. Sixteen wickets fell to spin bowling. One batsman was run out.

During the Leeward Islands' first innings the seamers used the new ball for eight overs before Jamaican captain Nikita Miller handed it to a spinner. In their second innings, a spinner got it after just five overs.

And this is not really unique to the Jamaican team. For a long time in the Caribbean, spin has been the preferred bowling method for getting wickets. Spinners have dominated the list of top wicket-takers every season, so much so that a few years ago, then director of cricket, Richard Pybus, contemplated initiating special fast bowling camps to augment the bowling stocks.

He made the announcement at the conclusion of the 2015-16 first-class season. "We are prioritizing and looking at some camps for our fast bowlers... possibly some measures off season to prioritize fast bowling in the four-day competition," said Pybus in an interview with WICB media.

"This is going to be central to us getting that back at the heart of West Indies cricket again...The competition has been still dominated too much by the spin bowlers. That is something that we will have to seriously address during the off season to make sure that we are prioritizing the fast bowlers."

The pitches in the Caribbean are no longer kind to fast bowlers. What they have in the West Indies nowadays are slow, low bouncing surfaces that turn from early in the game. No surprise then that fast bowlers are often surplus to requirements on pitches which are much more suitable to spin. And no surprise that regional captains mostly place their trust in their slow bowlers.

The result of this state of affairs is that there is a whole generation of batsmen, as Ian Bishop remarked on commentary, who've grown up on these lifeless wickets. They are therefore ill-equipped to handle the bouncing ball, and are often found out on sprightly wickets against bowlers willing to dig the ball in.

And so we come to the first day of the New Zealand-Windies