The first Test between the West Indies and England ended in a draw. On the fifth day, 286 were needed to win the match. However, the West Indies scored only 147 runs in 70 overs. Nkrumah Bonner and Holder played 35 overs together, ensuring the match would end in a draw.
However, Carlos Brathwaite, a West Indies limited-overs player, was not happy about this and He issued a message after the match, saying,
“If I were a senior player in the West Indies dressing room, I would have found it a bit disrespectful that in the last hour, with two set batsmen playing as they were and the pitch offering nothing, England still felt they could get six wickets, going all the way down to five balls left.”
“Would England have done that if it was an Ashes Test or against India, New Zealand or Pakistan? I think the answer is no, so why have they done it against us? The West Indies are a better team than we give them credit for.”
“If West Indies need any sort of steely determination added, I think that passage of play should have given them that. They should be thinking ‘we have two Tests now to prove we are better than England think we are.”
Before the start of the second match, Jason Holder had responded to this and There he said he would agree with his teammate Carlos Brathwaite.
“I definitely know what Carlos said and I would be wrong if I probably didn’t agree with him,”
And all-rounder Jason Holder also said,
“I thought they went on way too long. I thought from the last hour I told Bonner if we batted for five overs they would probably call it, but I was really surprised they went on that long. Joe was well within his rights to stretch it that long, and in a sense I didn’t mind because it gave the English team more overs in their legs. They had to toil a lot longer.”