• West Indies embrace T20 but ignore Test cricket at their peril
On Wednesday, Jermaine Blackwood scored a century against England. The West Indian player’s innings was a mixture of the sublime and the sloggy – one moment straight driving Ben Stokes for six, the next edging jammily through the slips. His chancy, improvisational performance was of an entirely different sort to those his team-mates played to save the match later in the week. In the second innings, when his team needed blockers, not blasters, Blackwood charged down the pitch and got himself out just as the new ball was due. The 23-year-old appears to think stonewalling is as arcane and irrelevant a craft as, well, stone walling.
Blackwood was soon being discussed as both a thrilling renaissance of West Indian flair and a cautionary demonstration of how T20 is shaping the Test match game. When CLR James described the great all-rounder Learie Constantine in Beyond a Boundary , he repeatedly wrote of a cricketer doing things “his own carefree way”. “He was ‘on the go’,” said James, “and if to remain on the go required the invention of a stroke on the spot, invented it would be. There, for me, is where a future for big cricket lies.” Sir Viv Richards may have fulfilled that prophecy, but maybe James saw further still, to today’s world of switch-hits and Dilscoops.
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from Sport | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1GYZM3p
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