West Indies picked one spinner for a turning pitch, and the fix their captain ruled out was the obvious one

Twenty of the thirty wickets that bowlers took in the second Test at the Queen’s Park Oval went to spin. West Indies picked one frontline spinner. Pakistan picked two, won by eight wickets, and walked away from a series they had been losing.

Roston Chase said the quiet part out loud once it was over, which is more than most captains manage. “I don’t want to say we misread the pitch, but we didn’t think that it was going to spin as much from so early,” he said in his post-match press conference. “So I think that that is where the problem came in.”

Fair enough. Pitches lie to everybody. What makes this one hard to file under bad luck is that West Indies still went in with the attack they wanted rather than the one the pitch was asking for, with a second frontline spinner sitting unused in the squad.

The fix he ruled out

Chase agreed West Indies could have found room for a second spinner. Joshua Bishop, uncapped, was the other frontline option in the squad. Then he closed the only door that made the arithmetic work.

“Captaining the side, I would never leave myself out to play anyone else,” he said. “If I am outright injured and can’t play, then I would sit out. But once I can still play as a batsman, I will always play. But I do think that we could have made room for an extra spinner, but it wouldn’t have been [instead of] myself at all.”

I understand the instinct. No captain wants to drop himself, and Chase made 70 in the first innings, so he was earning his place with the bat. But he had been nursing a finger injury since before the series, he has admitted he came back too quickly, and he got through seven overs of offspin in a Test where his left-arm spinner sent down 46. On that pitch, in that match, Chase was a specialist batter. If the extra spinner was not replacing him, it had to replace a seamer, and after Tarouba, where Jayden Seales and Justin Greaves bowled Pakistan out for 120 to win by 90 runs, dropping a quick was never going to feel like the obvious call either.

That is the awkward shape of it. West Indies had one selection that would have solved the problem and it was the one nobody in the room was ever going to make.

Two bowlers, one available

Some of this was simply bad luck stacked on bad luck. Greaves hurt his leg batting in the first innings and did not bowl at all in the match, weeks after taking seven wickets in Tarouba and becoming, per Cricinfo, the first bowler in the recorded era to take a wicket in five consecutive maiden overs. Chase called the loss of him “a big miss”, and it is hard to argue: two of West Indies’ bowling allrounders were on the field and neither could operate.

Which left Jomel Warrican. He bowled 46 of the 115 overs Pakistan faced in their first innings, took 6 for 112, and still watched Abdullah Shafique make 160 not out. Warrican has spent most of his career waiting behind fast bowlers, as Chase acknowledged when he congratulated “a guy who hasn’t been playing as many matches given that we tend to go with the pacers more often than not.” One spinner carrying 40% of an innings is not a plan. It is what happens when a plan falls apart.

What it cost

West Indies went into Port of Spain 1-0 up and one result from their first Test series win over Pakistan since 2000. They drew 1-1. Pakistan remain unbeaten in a Test series against them across 26 years, and picked up their first away Test win in three years along the way, ending an eight-match overseas losing run that had followed them everywhere.

Chase said he would have liked more grass and a surface that helped the quicks, and on the evidence of Tarouba he has a point about where this team’s strength sits. The trouble with that argument at home is that home is where you get to choose. If the curator hands you a turner and your squad has a second spinner in it, wishing for pace is not a selection policy.

None of this makes Chase a poor captain. His press conference was more honest than most, and a side missing Greaves with the ball and its captain’s offspin was always going to be short. But the next assignment is a two-Test tour of Bangladesh in October and November, the last of West Indies’ 2025-27 World Test Championship cycle, on pitches where one frontline spinner will look even thinner than it did this week. Kemar Roach is 38 and past 300 Test wickets. Bishop is still uncapped. At some point the balance question stops being about one misread pitch.

India, for what it is worth, are about to walk into the same conversation from the other side, having picked a squad heavy on spin for Galle and Colombo. Reading a surface correctly is not a Caribbean problem. Acting on the read is the harder half.

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