His father Shivnarine maintained an astonishing average of 63.85 in the 25 Tests he played against India but Tagenarine Chanderpaul will have to plot his own path. The 29-year-old will be West Indies’ opener in their two-Test series in India and he is more than aware of the enormity of the task.
“India has a great bowling line-up,” he says. “So you can’t take them for granted. You’ve got to go out there and give them the respect and try and score when you can.”
Chanderpaul has played just 10 Tests thus far, in which he has scored 560 runs at an average of 32.94 with one century and half-century each. Two of those Tests were at home against India in which he managed scores of 12, 7, 33 and 24 not out. “In the first Test [in Roseau], I didn’t get too many runs. [In the] second Test, I batted some balls. Kind of threw it away in the first innings. But playing (Ravichandran) Ashwin and (Ravindra) Jadeja… I can take some confidence from the second Test and do the right things going into this Test series,” he said.
Jadeja is still there but Ashwin ended his illustrious Test career earlier this year. India will also be without two other stalwarts in Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma and they are also a wounded bunch, with their incredible winning run in Test series at home that lasted well over a decade being torn apart by New Zealand late last year.
Chanderpaul has no experience of playing Test cricket in the subcontinent but he has done that at the first class level. He was part of the West Indies A squad that faced Bangladesh A in Sylhet and he scored 275 runs in five innings. “I had runs against two left-arm spinners and a few offspinners as well,” Chanderpaul says. “It was a fairly good tour for me. I had a few [good] scores. Hopefully I can try and get some runs in the series ahead.”
