WI vs PAK, 1st Test — Day 4 Result: West Indies won by 90 runs (WI 311 & 181; PAK 282 & 120)

West Indies won a Test match on the fourth afternoon in Trinidad, and the number that will be remembered is 90 — the margin — but the number that explains it is 211. That was the target. On the first morning of this match, 211 would have been a session and a half of untroubled batting. By Tuesday it was a mountain with no visible path up it, because the Brian Lara Academy pitch had spent four days quietly turning from a batting surface into a bowling one, and because West Indies had two men who understood exactly what to do with that.

Pakistan lasted 40.2 overs. They lost their last seven wickets for a handful of runs either side of tea and were bowled out for 120, and the strange, slightly haunting detail of the whole thing is that Babar Azam was there at the end, unbeaten on 58, having watched almost all of it from twenty-two yards away. There is no lonelier place in cricket than the non-striker's end during a collapse. Babar spent the afternoon there.

The day began with West Indies seven down in their second innings and 155 in front — a lead that was already awkward and could still have been made irrelevant. It wasn't. The last three wickets added 55, which does not sound like much until you convert it: it took the target from 156 to 211, and on this pitch that 55-run difference was the whole match. Mohammad Abbas finished with 5 for 22, figures that in almost any other week would be the story of the Test, and he still ended up on the losing side. That is the cruelty of a two-innings game — you can be the best bowler in a session and it counts for nothing if your batters cannot survive the next one.

Then Jayden Seales took the new ball and the match stopped being a contest. He finished with 5 for 20 from 14.2 overs — his fourth five-wicket haul in Test cricket, and the most complete of them. There was nothing exotic about it. He bowled a fraction fuller than a fast bowler's instinct wants him to on a surface offering that much, he hit the seam, and he let the pitch do the work it had been threatening to do since the second evening. The last act was Mohammad Abbas, having taken five wickets that morning, trapped in front for 23 to end the match.

Justin Greaves took the Player of the Match award with match figures of 7 for 39, and those figures deserve a moment because of how they were assembled. His 5 for 27 in Pakistan's first innings contained a spell of five consecutive wicket maidens — the first time that has happened in 147 years of Test cricket, breaking Stuart Broad's record of four. Then, on the fourth day, he came back and took 2 for 12 to help finish the job. Seven wickets for thirty-nine runs across a Test match is the sort of return an all-rounder gets once in a career, and Greaves got it in the same week he was still being described in some quarters as the seam-bowling option West Indies picked because they had to.

The wider point is about West Indies as a bowling unit rather than any one man. Roach, Seales, Shamar Joseph and Greaves bowled forty-odd overs on the final day between them and did not offer a release ball. On a deteriorating pitch the temptation is to attack the stumps and wait for the error; the discipline is to keep doing it after the first three chances have gone down or gone past the edge. They kept doing it.

Pakistan will look at 282 and 120 and conclude, correctly, that the first innings was where this was lost. Shan Masood's 109 was a proper captain's-era innings from a man who is no longer captain — a point that has been made loudly enough elsewhere this week — and Imam-ul-Haq's 63 gave it support. Getting to 282 against 311 on a pitch that was already misbehaving was a decent outcome; conceding a 29-run deficit was survivable. What was not survivable was the second innings, and specifically the fact that the second innings had almost no partnerships in it.

Masood came out to bat on the final day with a broken finger, which tells you something true about him and nothing useful about Pakistan's batting depth. He fell anyway. When your top order has to be brave rather than technically secure, the pitch has already won. Pakistan's tail was slashed away by a combination of the surface and four bowlers holding their lines, and 120 was the arithmetic result of a batting order that never once got two men set at the same time.

On the pitch itself: this was a four-day Test on a surface that was always going to become a four-day Test. It played reasonably true for a day and a half — Hope's 92 and Hodge's 84, then Masood's hundred, all came from that window — and from the third morning onwards it began offering low bounce, the occasional ball that kept desperately low, and enough seam movement off the cracks to make driving a gamble. Fourteen wickets fell on the third day and thirteen on the fourth. Nobody who watched days one and two would have predicted either number, which is the entire argument for playing Test cricket at Tarouba.

Babar Azam's 58 not out deserves its own paragraph, and not a celebratory one. He batted well — better than anyone else in the match in the fourth innings, comfortably — and the innings will sit in the scorebook as an unbeaten fifty in a defeat, the most thankless entry a batter can have. He is now the captain, which means the questions after this Test go to him rather than to Masood, and the honest answer is that there was very little more he could have done with the bat. There is quite a lot more Pakistan's selection and preparation could have done before the toss.

CricIntel did not publish a pre-match preview for this Test, so there is no prediction to review — our coverage began with the Day 1 stumps report. What we will own is the framing: after Day 1, with West Indies 194 for 3, we described the surface as one that would reward batting first and punish whoever batted last. That held. What we did not anticipate was Greaves — five consecutive wicket maidens is not something any model has a prior for.

West Indies lead 1-0 with one to play, and this is a genuinely significant week for them — a bowling attack that has been described as thin for most of a decade just took twenty wickets in under four days against a batting side containing Babar, Masood and Imam. Pakistan go to the second Test needing to solve a fourth-innings batting problem that is now several years old, with a captain three matches into the job and a No. 1 batter who has just carried a collapse. Watch Seales's workload — 14.2 overs in the fourth innings after a full match is a lot for a bowler of his age — and watch whether Pakistan back the same top six or blink.