CRICKET:England won the fourth Test by seven wickets yesterday evening, a result they had threatened ever since Paul Collingwood and Matthew Prior pulled them into the clear on Monday.
It brought to an end quite the most drab, dismal, lacklustre, bland, interminable, uninspiring series in recent memory, with the general standard of play all too often plumbing the depths of acceptability for international cricket - and not all of it from the visitors either.
Shorn of its colour, the contest instead has been played out in widows' weeds to a soundtrack of volcanic grumbling from Vivian Richards, who has been close to eruption about the level to which his once-proud side have sunk.
You would not, were you a West Indian cricketer of the current generation who valued his wellbeing, wish to cross Richards's path at present.
Until Monty Panesar intervened with his sixth five-wicket haul in Tests and, later, when Michael Vaughan pressed the accelerator and propelled his side toward their modest target of 110, England made hard work of things yesterday. Held up for the umpteenth time by Shivnarine Chanderpaul, they then lost Alastair Cook, sharply caught by Dwayne Bravo at second slip off Daren Powell, and Andrew Strauss, comprehensively castled by the same bowler after twice being missed in the slips.
There was enough help remaining in the pitch, aided by movement in the air under suitably sullen skies, for skilled bowlers still to nurse hopes of creating some late mayhem.
Fidel Edwards, however, sorely troubled with overstepping, could find no consistency and reverted to the desperation of banging the ball in short to one of the game's better pullers and hookers. The misses by Bravo and Chris Gayle that reprieved Strauss - neither of them straightforward, but catchable nonetheless - were not costly in themselves but symptomatic of the general malaise in the team.
Notwithstanding the further loss of Kevin Pietersen with only five runs needed, the game finished at a canter. In a nice juxtaposition it was Collingwood, one-day-captain-in-waiting, who struck the winning boundary, watched by Vaughan, whose unbeaten 48, with four boundaries, had come at almost a run a ball. The teams will now don their respective blue and maroon of one-day cricket and play out their brace of Twenty20 matches on successive days at The Oval, the first of them a week tomorrow, and then three limited-overs internationals.
Despite their recent close contests in the short form of the game (two bad sides equally matched) it is hard to envisage the matches being any closer than in the Test series, even given this will represent the start of a rebuilding process for England.
With the honourable exception of Chanderpaul, and to some extent Bravo, West Indies over the past month have done nothing to dispel the notion this is the worst side ever to travel from the Caribbean to England.
Quite what Chanderpaul thinks of all this is hard to say. His 70 yesterday, ended only as he tried to swing Panesar over the leg side for the second time in two balls, meant he had top-scored in each and every one of his past six innings, making at least a half-century in each, a record. The 446 runs he scored in this series - a total exceeded only by Pietersen - came at an average of 148.6. Man of the series for his country, and man of the match, was the least he deserved.
