• England v West Indies, 1st Test, Lord's, 4th day

Swann: Broad will keep breaking records

Andrew McGlashan at Lord's
May 20, 2012
Stuart Broad has played some of his best cricket at Lord's, as the honours board shows © PA Photos
Enlarge

Graeme Swann has backed Stuart Broad to break records, after taking his match haul against West Indies to 11 wickets and becoming only the fourth player to score a hundred, take five in an innings and 10 in a match at Lord's. However, it is far from certain that Broad's career-best performances will secure England a victory after a day of resilience from West Indies' batsmen was followed by two late strikes from Kemar Roach.

When Broad removed Darren Sammy, who played a key part in extending West Indies' lead to testing proportions, he became the first England bowler to take 10 on this ground since Ian Botham against New Zealand in 1978.

"Hats off to him he's on all three honours boards which is almost unique," Swann said. "He's going to be a guy who breaks record after record in his career and I'm just glad he's in my team. He admitted he's not been in the greatest of form for Nottinghamshire but he's a big match player and as soon as he got his first spell out of the way in this match he's bowled superbly."

However, it was Swann himself who claimed the wicket England most cherished when he finally trapped Shivnarine Chanderpaul lbw to end his 250-ball 91, which took his match occupation of the crease to 425 deliveries.

"It's always nice to get him out. It would have been nicer if he'd missed a sweep on 10 or 11 rather than 91," he said. "His partnership with [Marlon] Samuels showed if you bat with application on that pitch you become difficult to shift."

Application is something England will need plenty of on the final day after closing on 10 for 2 following the late dismissals of Andrew Strauss and nightwatchman Jimmy Anderson. During the winter they failed to chase 145 in Abu Dhabi, collapsing to 72 all out albeit on a very different surface - but Swann, always a glass-half-full cricketer, said the task was still well within hand.

"It's unfortunate to lose the skipper but it was always going to be a tricky 15 minutes batting in the gloom against a world-class bowler like Kemar Roach. Luckily we've got through relatively unscathed, we've got Trotty and Cooky at the crease so we'll very confident that they can see us through.

"We know the wicket is very good for batting, if anything it's better than the first two days. That tends to happen at Lord's. Hopefully the ball won't talk much like it didn't for us today. Once it gets to 30-35 overs old it seems to go a bit out of shape and not be very responsive. We beat the outside edge a lot but couldn't pick up the edges we did in the first innings. That was frustrating to say the least but I thought we stuck at our guns very well and to get a chase of less than 200 we're happy with."

Ottis Gibson, West Indies' coach, took great heart from his team's performance, especially that of the batsmen who kept England in the field for most of the day. Regardless of the result on Monday, he knows that the visitors have already surpassed many of the expectations surrounding them when they arrived.

"I haven't seen any fifth-day tickets so I'm not sure they expected it to go five days," he said. "We are coming back to make them fight for the rest of the runs. If we do well enough to win then great, we'll celebrate, but whatever happens when we get off that bus tomorrow we are coming here to fight. It will be a battle but we are up for that.

"If we can make some early inroads, like Trott and Kevin Pietersen who can take the game away from you, we've always felt we have an attack that can cause quite a few problems. It will be a good opportunity for them tomorrow."

Andrew McGlashan is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
Close