Although India won the four-match series 2-0 against the Caribbean side, they surrendered top spot in the ICC rankings to Pakistan, less than a week after taking over the number one position from Australia.
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“Personally I would say that I expected this kind of series”, said Ashwin.
Pakistan, who drew their recent Test series against England, are the fifth team to top the rankings.
The team – who have replaced India at the top – have not played a Test at home in six years for security reasons.
“Once this has been done it will be presented to the WICB (West Indies Cricket Board)”.
“We looked set to compete at certain stages of the series but just couldn’t close out at crucial stages”, he explained. “Going forward I think being Indian cricketers, expectations are something that you always expect and I hope I can live up to the expectations and keep winning games for the country”, he added.
“I don’t know about [whether we need an] extended camp because you just played four Test matches, well three-and-a-quarter Test matches, back-to-back, and we underestimate the power of rest after Test matches, but we also have two T20s [against India in Florida]”. Ravichandran Ashwin (India) was declared Man of the Match. People were crushing him down because of his style of play, but now I think those people should be proud as Pakistanis. We played well across two and three hours sometimes, and the next two hours we will be down.
In the end though, the deplorable playing conditions and the local authorities’ unpreparedness in coping with the challenges caused by the rains of the first afternoon rendered the tactical alterations meaningless. These people find it impossible to make changes that could, without any doubt, improve the game, because they believe Test cricket is more than a game. Of course, these are not yet great players – none apart from Younis Khan has reached that mark – but they have done what we in the ’90s were not able to do. “Not having a “super sopper” (mechanical mop) is unacceptable”.
West Indies legend Vivian Richards has called for an enquiry into the fiasco, describing the situation as “unacceptable”.
Since being established as one of the principal venues for global cricket in the Caribbean in 1930, no Test match or other senior worldwide fixture had ever been scheduled at the ground after the month of June until this series.
West Indies was 62-2 in its first innings with only 22 over bowled in the entire match.
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Previous to this embarrassment, two matches against England suffered from similarly freaky experiences. We batted well in Jamaica, but we went and did the same things we did in the first Test [again] in the third Test.
