Remember the Australian Cricket team's bowling glory days?

1 ANSWERS

1. amomipais82
   

   This was a throwback. This was the glory days revisited, those halcyon times for West Indies cricket when Michael and Malcolm, Andy and the Big Bird, Patto, Crofty, Courtney, Amby and Bish were in their ferocious, irresistible pomp.
   
   They were the days that those who once loved cricket in the Caribbean, who recognised it as the global representation of what could be achieved when a disparate region of islands, cultures, religions and ethnicities could be galvanised under one flag, thought had been lost for ever. But in one blazing bowling spell, inspirational beyond imagination, Jerome Taylor, son of Jamaica on his home turf, bowled himself into the West Indies hall of fame. A day earlier and he might even have been able to profit from it: early on Friday morning he learned that he had been bought for $150,000 by the Punjab Kings of the Indian Premier League. They should go on Bargain Hunt and clean up.
   
   With each England wicket that tumbled, the noise level rose, under the discreet shaded awnings of the Kingston Cricket Club, and diametrically opposite in the raucous confines of the Red Stripe enclosure where beer gets supped and the throb of the disco speakers hammers out its celebrations. "One day we gonna rise again like a ragin' fire," exhorts David Rudder in the magnificent anthem Rally Round The West Indies. There is a way to go before the blaze takes hold, but perhaps at Sabina Park Taylor kindled the flames.
   
   No one, not even if you stuck the DNA of Mystic Meg, Nostradamus and Gypsy Rose Lee in a jam jar, shook it up and cultivated the result, could have predicted the events as they unfolded either side of lunch. The pitch had spun from the first day, but for the pacemen, it had all the life of a jelly fish stuck on the beach. These are the pitches that break the heart of the quicks, not make them. But the pitch was of no concern to Taylor: he simply took it out of the equation, just as Michael Holding once did at The Oval by bowling full, straight and at the speed of light.
   
   Perhaps Taylor is genetically suited to such surfaces more than England's bowlers. Tall men hammer the ball into the middle and understand the hard way the law of diminishing returns. Stuart Broad, the gangly youngster of boundless energy and enthusiasm, had managed to flog a five-for out of it, a first for him in Tests. Taylor, though, is not a giant. Instead, he is as whippy as a sapling in the Trade Winds, and has a fast arm, sort of fast-twitch muscles that propel Usain Bolt, watching yesterday. It is an uncomplicated method too, involving a straight, rapidly urgent, run to the crease, a high action and a straight follow-through. The simple things really are the best. Then you have to add into it the adrenaline of the occasion, the knowledge that on the back of the stirling work of the West Indies batsmen his side were in with a sniff of a chance. With each successive wicket, a little more pumped into him and a little more energy conveyed itself to the other end, so that the batsmen seemed transfixed.
   
   In this most dramatic of spells – in which a game that had been bogged down by the constraints placed by the pitch and outfield on rapid scoring was transformed in a manner impossible into the blingy newcomer Twenty20 – the most sensational moment was the dismissal of Kevin Pietersen. In the first innings he had held the team together with 97 runs, ended by a top-edged heave that prompted the Sun to caption him Dumb Slog Millionaire. Once again he held the key. His second ball was Taylor's first after lunch. Time was when a batsman could expect something gentle, an easy post-prandial loosener to get things moving once more. Not this time. Taylor pitched full, not quite yorker but up there, allowing the ball time to grab the air and swing away. But it went too late for Pietersen, deceiving even his gimlet eye. Pietersen saw only a leg-side scoring opportunity, but the ball swerved beyond his bat.
   
   Then, as Pietersen's body obliterated the wicket from view, we, perched in the press box eyrie high up in the massive Blue Mountain Stand, saw his off stump appear from behind his back and cartwheel gymnastically back towards the keeper. For a split second, before the implication had taken hold, there was silence in the crowd. Then, as the realisation set in and Taylor began his celebratory sprint towards the Red Stripe stand pursued by a phalanx of team-mates, a cacophony erupted.
   
   It was, Holding has said, thus when he capped the most famous fast over in history by uprooting the off-stump of Geoffrey Boycott one day in Barbados. Fleetingly maybe, but for an afternoon, the glory days returned.

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