By Tony Cozier
SHIVNARINE CHANDERPAUL had to wait into the late afternoon on the opening day of the first Test against Bangladesh in St.Vincent on Friday before he could start his first Test innings as a 40-year-old.
By the time he got in, Kraigg Brathwaite was already past his second Test hundred; 19 years, 144 Tests and 27 hundreds his junior, the opening batsman’s single-minded defiance, driven by unwavering concentration, mark him as an unmistakable Chanderpaul clone.
Like Chanderpaul, there is no beauty about his batting. There are no booming drives, no lofted hits; his most attacking strokes are the cut, interspersed with the occasional off-drive.
The purpose of his batting is steady accumulation of runs, carefully compiled. There were 45 singles and 10 twos against 11 fours in his maiden hundred, 129 against New Zealand in Port-of-Spain in June; the count on Friday was 43-15-8.
Television analysts remark as much about his strong bottom hand as they do about the left-handed Chanderpaul’s quirky front-on stance; along with the opposite way they stand at the crease and their place in the batting order, it is a trait they do not share.
Friday’s was the latest of Brathwaite’s hundreds. He is reliably reported to have close to 50 at all levels – school,