West Indies deserve better than supporting role in England melodrama

Nobody ever beats England. England only ever lose of their own accord, by their own hand, from their own failings. This is doubly true if England are playing a team they generally expect to beat and, from the outbreak of ritual bloodletting that has followed the narrow 1-0 defeat in the recent Test series, West Indies certainly seem to have fallen into that category.

Why this might be the case is less easily explained. England have not won a Test series in the Caribbean since 2004. Four members of that touring party were commentating on this series. Three are current members of the backroom setup. Two were recently sacked from that setup. One is now the host of Top Gear.

Before that, you have go back to Colin Cowdrey’s side of 1967-68 and an ill-advised declaration by Garfield Sobers in Trinidad. One series win in 54 years. And yet somehow England keep returning to these islands with the same blind optimism, embarking on this assignment with the same baseless expectation, leaving with the same sense of prickled outrage.

So Kyle Mayers doesn’t take seven wickets in Grenada. Instead, England throw their wickets away, in the same way that Joshua Da Silva doesn’t hit a match-winning century but simply watches his total increase as a result of England’s bowlers losing the plot. And despite what Jayden Seales, Jason Holder or Alzarri Joseph might tell you, no bowler in the history of cricket has ever dismissed Zak Crawley. Crawley, like James Vince and Jos Buttler before him, only ever gets himself out.

Perhaps it should not be overly surprising that England’s latest defeat has inspired another round of gloomy introspection and screaming psychodrama, of grown men on the internet grumbling about pitches and pathways, of ex-pros