West Indies Test team finally on right track

West Indies' captain Jason Holder (right) with Roston Chase. (AP)

No cricket team have their own celebrated past used against them quite like the West Indies.
They dominated Test cricket for some 15 years from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s and, having even before then been viewed as the five-day game's 'great entertainers', it has made the Caribbean side's ensuing decline in the format seem all the more acute.
Yet damning the likes of Kemar Roach as "no Malcolm Marshall" miss the point that few cricketers before or since have reached the same standard as the late West Indies fast bowler.
Roach, however, didn't have to be Marshall or Joel Garner as he ripped through England's top-order with a return of five for 17 in a first-innings total of 77 all out that set up Saturday's colossal 381-run win for the West Indies in the first Test at his Kensington Oval home ground in Barbados.
And West Indies captain Jason Holder, one of six Bajans in the side, didn't have to bat like Garfield Sobers, the island's greatest cricketer, as he struck a majestic 202 not out in the same match.
Nor did unheralded spinner Roston Chase have to bowl like celebrated all-rounder Sobers as he took a startling eight for 60 in England's second innings of a match that ended with more than a day to spare.
Admittedly, England began the series third in the world Test rankings compared to West Indies' eighth, a reflection of the Caribbean side's recent struggles in New Zealand and Asia, where they suffered four defeats.
And yet the warning signs were there for Joe Root's men, with the West Indies winning the second Test at the Yorkshireman's Headingley home ground two years ago, albeit losing that series.
The emergence of lucrative Twenty20 franchise events such as the Indian Premier League have proved particularly enticing for players from depressed Caribbean economies.
Meanwhile a series of high-profile rows involving Cricket West Indies president Dave Cameron and several once-senior if underperforming Test players have exacerbated the problems of inter-island rivalry - the West Indies exists as a cricket entity among otherwise separate independent states - geography and finance which have long plagued cricket in the Caribbean.