At Edgbaston this morning, Joe Root pushes the first ball, a fuller delivery, to mid-on. In Joseph’s second over, Ollie Pope decides to cut a ball in the channel rooted in his crease with a horizontal bat. That’s a big no, no, on this slow-paced pitch. Pope ends up punching the back of his bat more than once after watching his inside edge uprooting his middle stump. It is enough to send Joseph squealing in delight.
But Seales is not distracted and soon after forces an outside edge from Harry Brook who is caught at slip – exactly in the same fashion as at Trent Bridge. From their overnight 38 for 3, England are 54 for 5 inside the first hour of the morning.
Fans in the Caribbean, watching all this in the tender hours of the morning, must have started to believe. Rally, rally, they would have urged their team. In the end, though, emotion is not enough to win Test matches. You need more than one plan. You need to sustain pressure and create it even if nothing is in your favour, including the pitch. You need to find ways to dry up the flow of runs.
All this is known to Kraigg Brathwaite, a proud leader who, after Joseph’s miracle spell at the Gabba in January, flexed his biceps to tell former Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg who had derided West Indies as “pathetic and hopeless” at the outset.
On Saturday, though, as the afternoon stretched out, West Indies’ plight became more and more hopeless. First, Root and Stokes gradually loosened the visitors’ grip by rotating the strike and picking runs comfortably going into the lunch. Immediately after the break, West Indies seemed to have a plan.
Joseph continued the short-ball barrage against Jamie Smith in his following over, coming from round the stumps. The first time he attempted to hook, Smith ended up gloving the ball, just over the outstretched hands of the leaping da Silva. Joseph had himself leapt in the air in his excitement, thinking da Silva had pouched Smith. The next delivery, Joseph directed another bouncer, which this time failed to climb up and Smith instinctively pulled it over the roof of the rousing Hollies Stand, forcing a ball change.
Instead of sticking to the plan of bowling short and packing the field on the leg side, West Indies drifted away from it. That allowed Root to march towards his century and Smith to settle down quickly. Even after Root departed, Chris Woakes managed to quickly carry forward the momentum alongside Smith as the pair eventually helped England take the lead.
Seales conceded that while the Windies bowlers had “showed great fight” on both Friday evening and Saturday morning, they had failed to do it “consistently, and backing it up all the time.”
He cited the example of Smith, who he described as a “compulsive hooker”, someone West Indies should have attacked for longer with the short ball. “If we had stuck at it little bit longer and keep forcing him to do it time after time, one may not have held and he could’ve gotten out.”
But Seales disputed the idea that West Indies had failed to keep the pressure at all times on a pitch that was slow and scoring was easy. “We bowled well as a group,” he said. “Collectively we were on the right spots the majority of the time. We forced them to go at it and try and score runs quickly and it paid off for them.
“Kudos to them. But I thought we did our job as a bowling unit: we stuck to it as long as we possibly could. And when the time came to try the short ball, we gave our best efforts. It just didn’t go our way.”
About 10 minutes before lunch the Hollies stand burst out singing Livin’ on a Prayer. Da Silva didn’t mind joining in and was heard on the stump mic singing Jon Bon Jovi’s anthem. At the time it was all fun and frolic. By the late afternoon, the lyrics summed up West Indies’ situation in this match – and this series.
Nagraj Gollapudi is news editor at ESPNcricinfo