Kraigg?Brathwaite will get the chance to rebuild his Test career on next month’s tour of New Zealand, while Chris Gayle now has to wait for a while before he plays his 100th Test.
Brathwaite, who turns 21 on Sunday, heads to New Zealand to replace the injured Gayle, knowing that this represents another chance to prove his worth on the international stage.
The obdurate little opener, who has scored heavily at schoolboy level, most recently made his mark on the “A”?Team tour of India with three scores over 80, including an unbeaten hundred in the two unofficial “Tests”.
However, he has struggled in the Test arena and after nine Tests he has just four half-centuries, six ducks and an average of 21.
Those close to him say he now has a second gear and no longer has the ultra-defensive mindset that has earned him a shockingly low strike rate of 31.
That is left to be seen. The opening Test starts on Tuesday (Monday evening local time), at the University Oval in Dunedin.
This is bound to be an important series not only for Brathwaite, but for skipper Darren Sammy and most of the team who struggled so badly against Mahendra Dhoni’s men.
Sammy can certainly hold his own in the Twenty20 and the 50-over formats but he is not up to Test standard and another abysmal performance should certainly spell the end of his career in the longer version of the game.
This is bound to be a tough series for the West Indies, whose poor away record is arguably second to none in recent times.
They have just one series win in New Zealand in the last 50 years, the only success in that period coming when Courtney Walsh led them to a 1-0 victory in a two-Test series in 1995.
Since then the West Indies were beaten 2-0 in both 1999 and 2006, while the last series in 2008 was drawn 0-0.
This is at a time when beating New Zealand has become commonplace. The West Indies and Sri Lanka are the only two major teams not to have a series victory there in the last 15 years. England won in 2008, India in 2009, Australia in 2010, Pakistan in 2011 and South Africa last year.
Pakistan have been great travellers to New Zealand, losing just once in 12 series out there, winning seven of them. The only time that Pakistan lost a series in New Zealand was nearly 30 years ago, back in 1985.
Gayle will be hurt in more ways than one. He has 99 Tests and 6 933 runs and is en route to joining the 7 000-run club. He would have been happy to face the Kiwis, whom he averages 75 against, higher than against any other opponents.
Those 67 runs and that magical 100th Test may be a long way off with the West Indies not scheduled to play any further Tests in the foreseeable future.
The English are headed here at the end of February, but that brief tour of Antigua and Barbados is limited to just three One-day Internationals and three Twenty20s in March.
As a result of the hamstring injury Gayle picked up in Kochi, the team camp expects that the opener will need three to four weeks to regain full fitness.
West Indies have won only eight of 22 ODIs in 2013, of which three have come against lightweights Zimbabwe.
