Gingerly, carefully and optimistically, Shamar Joseph warmed up to try to bowl on the final day of the series. His right foot, not broken but badly bruised by a Mitchell Starc yorker, had been settled with painkillers but still looked a long way from flexibility.
Looking on from their warm-up, Australia’s players observed quizzically. Surely Joseph, playing his second Test match, did not have any more miracles to deliver after his batting heroics and first-ball dismissal of Steve Smith in Adelaide? Did he ever!
There was no sign of his toe injury as Shamar Joseph celebrated bowling the West Indies to a famous Test win over Australia at the Gabba.Credit: Getty Images
Figures of 7-68, capped off by the cartwheeling off stump of Josh Hazlewood to hand West Indies an eight-run victory, are now forever etched into Test match lore. So often cast as the greatest victims of the Twenty20 franchise era, the undersung Caribbean side now has new and joyful life.
Seldom does a bowler turn a Test match on its head like Joseph did here. Almost never does a rookie West Indian do so. Almost never does anyone do it to Australia on these shores. Almost never does anyone do it as a visitor to the Gabba.
Joseph’s performance will be long remembered, twisting a comfortable Australian victory into one of the best Test finishes seen in this country for decades. Perhaps only New Zealand’s narrow win at Hobart in 2011 comes close since the turn of the century.
Looking back, the most similarly impactful spell by a West Indian in Australia was Curtly Ambrose’s 7-1 demolition of Alan Border’s team in Perth in 1993. Ambrose, though, was already an established great of the game – Joseph is writing fresh pages of history faster than any publisher could possibly print them.
It looked unlikely that Shamar Joseph would be able to bowl in Australia’s second innings when he was hobbled by a searing Mitchell Starc yorker.Credit: Getty Images
But as he turned at the top of his mark for the fifth ball of his second over, Joseph could see the scoreboard telling a familiar tale. Australia were 2-113 and only 103 runs from yet another victory over the West Indies – 16 since their last defeat, way back in 2003. The scenario looked to be an impossible one.
Then again, impossible is not a word that Joseph seems to have thought much about, having emerged from the remote Guyana village of Baracara, tape-ball cricket and jobs in logging and security before sprinting up the pathway of West Indian cricket. On the final day, Joseph arrived at the ground without his match shirt. Only some better-than-expected warm-up deliveries caused it to be sent for.
Impossible? Tell that to Shamar Joseph
10
0
28.01.2024
Gingerly, carefully and optimistically, Shamar Joseph warmed up to try to bowl on the final day of the series. His right foot, not broken but badly bruised by a Mitchell Starc yorker, had been settled with painkillers but still looked a long way from flexibility.
Looking on from their warm-up, Australia’s players observed quizzically. Surely Joseph, playing his second Test match, did not have any more miracles to deliver after his batting heroics and first-ball dismissal of Steve Smith in Adelaide? Did he ever!
There was no sign of his toe injury as Shamar Joseph celebrated bowling the West Indies to a famous Test win over Australia at the Gabba.Credit: Getty........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
