By: Sandipan Bose
India vs West Indies Score: Day 1
West Indies: 196 (all out) | Blackwood (62), Samuels (37) | Ashwin 5/52, Ishant 2/53, Shami 2/23, Mishra 1/38
India: 126/1 | KL Rahul (75 not out), Cheteshwar Pujara (18 not out), Dhawan (27) | Roston Chase 1/28
India trail by 70 runs with 9 wickets remaining. View full scorecard HERE.
The Kingston pitch was relatively slower than the one in Antigua. It was slow enough for three spinners to come into play. However, the team management didn’t show any willingness to add an extra spinner.
India went with three fast bowlers. Virat Kohli knew that Ravichandran Ashwin would be good enough all by himself, which was exactly the case on Day 1 of the 2nd Test match against the West Indies.
Ashwin literally ran through the West Indies middle-order. His fifer wretched havoc, as the hosts fell like a pack of cards at Jamaica’s Sabina Park.
The tall off-spinner spell overshadowed Amit Mishra’s bowling spell. Mishra was looking like someone who was under-bowled in the first innings of the Jamaica Test.
All put together, it was again a shoddy batting display by the West Indies. They often making it look like a pointless Test cricket match.
That is because the West Indies are not able to match the Indian bowling, barring Jermaine Blackwood and Marlon Samuels. In terms of managing against the pace, their applications were also very limited.
The Indian pacers, Ishant Sharma and Mohammad Shami, too had their big moments at the start of the West Indies innings when they captured two wickets apiece.
