Against Australia at the Sabina Park Cricket Ground, the West Indies dropped Kraigg Brathwaite from the Test XI for the first time since 2014.
Against Bangladesh at Kingston in December 2024, Brathwaite broke Garry Sobers’ West Indian record of 85 consecutive Test matches. He extended that to 90 consecutive Tests, which places him 11th on the all-time list at the time of writing (at 12th place is Tom Latham, with an active streak of 88).
Read: Kraigg Brathwaite is criminally underrated
In March 2025, Brathwaite stepped down as captain, but played the first two Tests of the ongoing series, at Bridgetown, Barbados and at St George’s Grenada under Roston Chase. At Grenada, he became the eighth West Indian to play a hundred Test matches. The feat is even more astonishing, for he is yet to play a professional T20 match.
Read: West Indies Test captain steps down
At the third Test, however, the West Indies replaced Brathwaite with debutant Kevlon Anderson. This was the first time the West Indies went into a Test match without Brathwaite since the New Zealand Test of 2014 at the same venue.
Why did the West Indies leave out Brathwaite?
Brathwaite has 5,950 runs, which places him at 10th on the all-time West Indian list. Among openers, his 5,921 runs are behind only the tallies of Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, and Chris Gayle. His third-innings 52 turned out to be decisive on a spin-dominated Multan surface, where the West Indies’ last Test before this series.
However, Brathwaite has failed to make it to double figures in any of the four innings in the ongoing Test series: his four innings read 4, 4, 0, and 7. Before the series, he had made 35 and 0 against South Africa A.
Perhaps a matter of just as much concern was his form in the West Indies Championship 2025, the domestic first-class competition. He made 393 runs at 43.67 there, but 212 of these came in his first match of the tournament, against the West Indies Academy. Since then, he is yet to reach fifty in first-class cricket across 16 first-class innings: 10 of his 14 dismissals in this phase have been for single-digit scores.
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