What happened is shown by the numbers. Greaves and No. 8 Kemar Roach fought without losing for 409 balls, a 180-run stand of unwavering determination that broke the record for the seventh wicket set by Sachin Tendulkar and Manoj Prabhakar 35 years earlier. This was the West Indies’ longest fourth innings since 1930, at 163.3 overs. Their fourth-inning total of 457 for 6 is the highest time-bound total ever. Greaves batted 388 balls, 201 of which were in a stand of 196 with Shai Hope, who, despite having an eye ailment, scored a hundred.
Some Test matches begin as commonplace, veer into the desperate, and finish somewhere in the middle of the miraculous and the bloody-minded. One of them was this. After being 100 for 2 and then 167 all out in the first innings, the West Indies were asked to make 530 or survive two days. According to logic and recent history, they should have lost the Test match much earlier, but Justin Greaves made an incredible 202* on the final day of the Christchurch Test, an innings that started as rescue and ended as refusal.
However, the texture of how this game played out on the last day—how improbability gave way to possibility and then, momentarily, to something wilder—cannot be fully captured by numbers. There was a time when the absurd appeared almost plausible at 398 for 6, requiring 132 from 33 overs with four wickets remaining. Go after it? What’s the point? However, Greaves and Roach hunkered down and batted New Zealand into fatigue, going with common sense rather than theatre.
New Zealand had already been cooked. Two days of labour will accomplish that. Matt Henry and Nathan Smith, two front-line seamers who are injured, will do that. Burning all three reviews before to the last session will undoubtedly do that. There wasn’t much else they could do, so they had to keep appealing, hoping, and watching the umpire’s head shake.
On a different day, after a review or two, one of the two opportunities Michael Bracewell created in the last session—an LBW and a caught behind against Roach—leads to dismissal and opens up the tail, and the situation changes drastically. This day, however, was one of luck and guts. Both teams had the latter; Bracewell bowled 55 overs of off-spin on a fifth-day track that offered little, while the two standing seamers, Jacob Duffy and Zakary Foulkes, bowled 76 overs between them in the second innings and were still in the game when the third new ball was available with four overs left. Simply put, West Indies had more of the latter.
At the beginning of the last day, when 90 overs seemed to go on forever even against a weakened attack, it didn’t appear that way. However, Hope and Greaves, the overnight companion and centurion, finished the first hour without any problems and added 55 runs just to be safe. Batting like that makes you think, “Well, maybe.” After drinks, the third over arrived, and the maybe vanished. Duffy’s short-ball strategy paid off in the end. Tom Latham managed to dive and pouch Hope’s pull shot behind the stumps as it hovered in the air for just a few seconds after 239 balls of concentration.
Foulkes quickly put Tevin Imlach out of the game with a nip-backer from the opposite end, and the West Indies were suddenly looking at seven overs until lunch plus two full sessions with victory—253 runs away and four wickets standing. He hit Bracewell past square leg for a single in the first over following lunch. He felt a brief sense of relaxation before returning to his rescue quest.
However, Greaves’ sitting score of 97, three shy of a second Test century, was the immediate cause for alarm.
After that, New Zealand tried everything, but nothing seemed to work. After Bracewell’s LBW appeal, in which the ball pitched just outside leg, they burned a review on Roach. Additionally, they cost them money when they dropped Roach off Bracewell on 30 and again on 47. 104 runs were added in 29 overs between Lunch and Tea as their partnership deepened, and by the time the final session started, New Zealand’s body language was clear. Fielders threw carelessly. Shoulders slumped. The kind of fatigue that results from knowing that everything you’ve done is correct except for the one crucial item.
It should have been their last session. Stretching forward, Roach, 53 after his first Test fifty in a 16-year career, lost to Bracewell’s turn. It was not out by umpire Alex Wharf. The review would have gone to New Zealand. There was none for them. Roach feathered an edge to the keeper for the same score. Not offered. Reviews are no longer available.
While New Zealand gave Greaves the single early in overs in an attempt to isolate the tail-ender, Roach remained on 53 for 72 balls, deadbatting everything. Roach wasn’t acting like a tail-ender, though. He was acting like a seasoned 85-Test player who knew what this meant. In the last 10 overs, Greaves started to cramp, the culmination of all that tension and exertion. New Zealand threw everything they had, swarmed the bat, and attacked with close-in fielders because they knew a West Indian victory was out of the question. It works on a different day. The opposition did not back down on this particular day.
India
