Windies captain Jason Holder expressed disappointment with his top-order batsmen, saying that the team just haven’t got the runs they have needed from the main batsmen often enough. Totals of 181, 196, 311 and 127 in the 2-0 series loss to India show why Holder has such an opinion.
Only one Windies batsman – Roston Chase with 185 runs from four innings – featured in the list of top-five scorers in the series that was dominated by the 18-year-old Player of the Series, Prithvi Shaw, and the 20-year-old Rishabh Pant.
“In my short tenure as a Test cricketer (I’ve learnt that) you’ve got to be patient and build on what performance you intend to put on,” Holder said after the second Test in Hyderabad, which India won by 10 wickets to complete a series sweep.
“You can look and honestly say we didn’t put enough runs on the board. Quite for some time now we’ve been relatively inconsistent and that has really let us down in the recent past. We haven’t been getting the runs we’ve been looking for.
“Anybody knows that in any form of cricket you ask the top five-six batsmen get the bulk of runs. It hasn’t been happening.”
“We have heavily relied on middle and lower half which is not ideal. So we need to rectify at the top,” Holder said. “The guys in the top five have to put hands up and come to the party.”
Even in the first Test at Rajkot, the visitors failed to cross 200 and were 74/6 before Chase and Keemo Paul took the team past the 100-run mark in their first essay. However, that didn’t prove to be enough as the Windies were asked to follow on and were eventually handed an innings defeat.
