"Warri, leave it!"
Jayden Seales, as you might expect looking at those broad shoulders and imposing frame, has a voice that carries. He had let out that bellow from the bowling end and, 75 metres across at square leg, Jomel Warrican stopped dead in his tracks. Unfortunately for him, though, he'd already picked up the ball, on its way at a trickle to the boundary. One Seales had ordered him to leave.
Seales threw up his hands in frustration, sweat dripping off his brow. It was, despite the occasional cloud cover, a stiflingly humid day in Tarouba, and Seales was bowling fast. Not, with respect to his Pakistani counterparts, the kind of gentle medium pace that qualifies as fast because it isn't spinning, but actual pace, in the high 130s and low 140s. Warrican, tail between his legs, shuffled back to his fielding position as Seales steamed over to the top of his run-up.
The fury was discordant with the match situation. Pakistan were still 98 runs away from chasing down the 211 West Indies had set them and down to their last pair. There was a day-and-a-half left in the game. Time was the only thing separating West Indies from a thumping win. It could all have been settled with a wry smile.
But, you see, it was the last over before tea, and Warrican picking up the ball meant it no longer went to the boundary. Pakistan's batters had run a single, taking Mohammad Abbas off strike and bringing Babar Azam, the one batter to have clung on even as he watched West Indies blow his team-mates away, back on. Seales wanted to finish the game, and more importantly, wanted to do it himself; it would give him his fourth five-wicket haul in Tests. He wasn't especially bashful about making clear he wanted it; earlier in the partnership, he had made no attempt to stop the final ball of a Shamar Joseph over from going for four, aware it would give him six cracks at Abbas.
Perhaps, if this was a game involving one of the bigger teams, there would have been some hand-wringing around the spirit of cricket. But, then again, maybe the best way to honour the spirit of cricket, Test cricket more specifically, is to decide to play it. That is one metric by which Seales, or this West Indies pace attack, could never be found wanting. At a time when discussions about players ditching Test cricket to tour the T20 franchise circuit automatically conjures up images of West Indian cricketers, West Indies' first choice pace attack has put Test cricket front and centre.
Seales played Pakistan in 2021 shortly after his debut, playing a starring role with both ball and bat as a teenager in a thrilling one-wicket win, where he took West Indies over the line batting alongside Kemar Roach. He marked that game with a five-wicket haul, and has since become ever-present in the format, among a handful of West Indies players to take 100 wickets before the age of 25. Pakistan have been familiar victims of his torment, something he would have been reminded of as he toyed with them in the fourth innings; nearly a fifth of his Test wickets have come in four Tests against this opposition, and at just over 17 runs per wicket. A glance at his T20 figures suggests it is a format he has put very much on the backburner for now, with just nine games for West Indies and a further 42 franchise matches.
There was a much-deserved outpouring of admiration for Roach when he reached 300 Test wickets against Sri Lanka, though perhaps there is a danger his longevity slightly detracts from his sheer quality over this time. At home, Roach averages exactly 22 for his 206 wickets. That is better, for context, than Glenn McGrath in Australia, Richard Hadlee in New Zealand, and James Anderson and Stuart Broad in England. Better, in fact, than all bar four fast bowlers with at least 200 home wickets in the history of the game. He has, in 17 years, played 46 T20s, the last eight years ago.
Shamar Joseph's Cricinfo page may have begun to resemble a catalogue of T20 teams you often forget once existed, but even his cricketing achievements are firmly tied to this format ever since he spearheaded his side to that thrilling win in Brisbane. Even Alzarri Joseph, whose decision to make himself unavailable for this series earned the thinly veiled ire of his coach Daren Sammy, has been playing Test cricket for West Indies for a decade. No active Pakistan bowler has matched the 42 Tests he has played; just one this century - Umar Gul - can better that.
Since Seales made his debut in 2021, shortly before those exploits against Pakistan, three West Indies fast bowlers rank in the top ten Test wicket-takers: Seales, Alzarri Joseph and Roach all cluster in together from seven to nine. If you begin the list in January 2024, around when Shamar Joseph first sent down an red ball in international cricket, he, too, finds his way in at No. 8, just two wickets behind Pat Cummins. You would, incidentally, have to drop past the top 20 in the first list, and get to No. 30 in the second, to stumble upon the first name from Pakistan.
West Indies and Pakistan have often drawn solidarity from their similarities over history. Their charismatic volatility, their attractive brands of cricket, their shared glory days in the 1980s when they were the two best Test sides in the world, and the fiercely contested series that prove it. They are, for much less happier reasons, in similar positions now, with dwindling global cricket influence, declining commercial interest in what they have to offer, and increasingly squeezed towards the margins. They finished as the bottom two sides at the previous World Test Championship cycle, and, until this Test began, were in the same positions.
Tying their intertwined bond, though, was the ferocity of their fast bowling, almost doubling as a superiority complex that explained why their brand of cricket was so much more watchable and, by extension, better than everyone else's. The last week at the Brian Lara Cricket Academy, though, has begun to show where these two sides might finally have diverged.
Abbas might be brilliant, but a past Pakistan side would have viewed him as a balancer to an actual pace attack, not the lead actor in a sad production slightly off the West End, one that for some reason must also feature Khurram Shahzad and Mohammad Ali. Who, you see, do the same thing as Abbas, but not as well. Because the real star actors - who dominated Pakistan's last tour here and were once the bright prospects Seales and Joseph are - are, you see, playing the high-quality cricket that matters now. For Kandy Royals in the Lanka Premier League.
West Indies, instead, have found a pace attack not recycled from those spit out and rejected by the franchise circuit, but high-quality fast bowlers, who are nobody's understudies. Bowlers that yell and scream because they want that five-wicket haul. Bowlers that, with a little more help from their batters, would be putting many more teams to the sword like they did this week.