Roston Chase walked into the media room in Delhi wearing the look of a captain beaten but not broken. India had wrapped up a seven-wicket win inside four days, yet West Indies had, for once in 2025, stayed in the contest long enough to ask questions.
Key facts first. Shai Hope and John Campbell produced centuries – the team’s first of the year – and together batted more than 80 overs across the two innings. That was also a first for this campaign, achieved against a balanced Indian attack featuring Jasprit Bumrah, Kuldeep Yadav and Ravindra Jadeja.
“Yeah, I think this is the kind of fight that I wanted to see from us, from matches before,” Chase said. “So, I think this is a stepping stone, a building step for us to go forward and improve as a Test-playing nation. This is a performance that I think will give us the confidence and boost us in terms of that belief that we can do it against proper Test-playing nations.”
He then added, “I just want to see the guys continue in this vein and don’t let us go back to those ways. Even if it’s for us to lose, we have to lose in a good way. In a positive way, where we can have a lot of positives coming out of the game.”
Missing pace spearheads Shamar Joseph and Alzarri Joseph to injury, West Indies relied on a make-shift seam unit. The bowlers did their bit; the batting had been the bigger concern across the last two World Test Championship series. Chase accepted as much.
“I think where we could improve mainly is our batting,” he said. “I think that’s what let us down for the last two series. I think we have a good bowling attack, we had a few injuries. I just think that once we can put good first-inning totals on the board, we will be able to fight for some wins in the Test Championship.”
Hope and Campbell’s 213-run stand was the highest by any West Indian pair this year, and the timing mattered. The team had been rolled over inside three days in Brisbane and Karachi earlier in the cycle, so surviving into the final afternoon in Delhi brought tangible relief.
Yet the captain knows structural realities at home continue to bite. “When a lot of our players come into the international level, they play like 20 first-class games, 15 first-class games,” he pointed out. “While other teams, when guys come into international cricket, they have like 80 first-class games, 100 first-class games.”
That shortage of domestic overs forces young batters to “learn on the job,” as Chase put it. He argued that extended runs in the Test XI, even through lean patches, will hasten that learning: “So if a guy can get a little longer run [playing Test matches] so that he can adjust and adapt to this level and see what it takes for him to improve and to be consistent at this level, I think that’s good.”
Justin Greaves offered another glimmer. The all-rounder’s unbeaten 50 from No. 7, his third score above fifty in five innings, underlined squad depth often missing in recent years. “The fight that we showed in this last game will, as I said, give us that belief and that confidence to know that we have what it takes to perform at this level,” Chase concluded.
India leave the capital two-nil up, job done. West Indies fly to Dhaka next, armed with the modest satisfaction of progress rather than points. For a side craving consistency, that, for now, will have to do.
