ON the first day of the last Test of a long and difficult season, the West Indies struck on one of the fast bowlers for whom they have searched desperately, and in vain, to maintain their proud fast bowling legacy.
Fidel Edwards, the 21-year-old Barbadian plucked from the obscurity of Barbados club cricket and put into the team almost solely on captain Brian Lara's assessment of his bowling at net practice a month ago, claimed five wickets for 36 on debut as Sri Lanka struggled to an all-out 208 on the opening day of the second and final Test here.
Delivering with a round-arm action - an uncanny hybrid of a pair of legendary fast bowlers, Jeff Thomson and Waqar Younis - he generated pace that did not match theirs but still occasionally touched 90 miles an hour and rarely went below 85.
Throughout his 16.4 overs, broken into four spells, he maintained control of length and line that seldom offered the batsmen any liberties.
Nothing has been more uplifting all season - not even, in the circumstances, Jermaine Lawson's seven wickets in Antigua - than how Edwards summarily dispatched the last four wickets for eight runs from 2.4 overs with the second new ball.
It was the way Thomson and Waqar - not to mention the host of great West Indians of an earlier generation - might have done it.
His first ball, fast and off full length, swung into Kumara Sangakkara who had defied the West Indies for four and a quarter hours and 212 balls for a painstaking, chancy and critical top score of 75.
The left-hander's instinct was to let it pass outside off stump and he was shocked when it passed his raised bat and crashed into his pad in front of off stump. Umpire Russell Tiffin's lbw verdict was clearcut.
Edwards then disregarded the left-handed No.9 Thusara's thrashing and invited him to repeat a drive to the extra-cover boundary one ball to the next that he sent just a little wider of off-stump. The resulting edge was snaffled up by Lara at first slip.
Muttiah Muralitheran and Prabath Nissanka were swiftly dealt with.
Muralitheran had no answer to one that pitched off-stump and breached his defence to hit the top of off. Nissanka aimed to leg and deflected a catch to second slip off the back of the bat.
The first teammate to embrace Edwards was, understandably, Lara. He had stuck his neck out for him in what was a bold, unconventional selection that has been widely questioned and was clearly overjoyed, if not surprised, to have it immediately vindicated.
Yet Edwards' start had not been propitious.
His fourth ball brought the disappointment of the first of five chances missed for the day, Omari Banks spilling a two-handed catch at square-leg off first innings century-maker Marvan Atapattu, then 14.
The setback was fleeting. In his sixth over, the last to lunch, Mahela Jayawardene was surprised by one that lifted over off-stump and steered it so low to Chris Gayle's left at second slip that Tiffin and his colleague at point, Darrel Hair, had to consult before confirming the catch was cleanly, and brilliantly, taken.
Edwards had only five overs in the second session, when Omari Banks, the tall, 20-year-old off-spinner, tied down the northern end and Vasbert Drakes and Corey Collymore, Edwards' neighbour in Boscobelle in the northern Barbados parish of St.Peter, kept the pressure on with the George Headley Stand behind them.
Sri Lanka went to tea tottering at 141 for six but Sangakkara and fellow left-hander Chaminda Vaas defied them for an hour and a half on resumption, adding 52.
Both were reprieved. Sangakkara should have ben snaffled by wicket-keeper Ridley Jacobs off Drakes at 31 but the keeper let the edge pass. Vaas hooked Collymore into and out of Drakes' clutches at square-leg in a plan expertly executed by Collymore.
It took Edwards' new ball devastation to put an end to the resistance in quick time.
The West Indies reverted to their once established policy of pure pace for the first time since the first Test against Australia in early May and, if the only similarity between the quartet here and those of an earlier generation was the places of their birth, the effect was similar.
The attack comprised the four fast bowlers with a mere nine Tests and 27 wickets between them and Banks, with seven expensive wickets in his three Tests.
Lara still had enough confidence in such inexperience to bowl first on winning the toss on the evidence of a well grassed pitch.
As it was, it offered some bounce, if little pace, but the decision was justified as Sri Lanka lost three wickets for 77 by lunch, a position that would have been more dire but for two straightforward missed chances.
Santah Jayasuriya opened up with a typical salvo against Jerome Taylor, the young Jamaican whose lack of control hinted at youthful nerves in front of his home crowd.
The left-hander hit him out of the attack with four boundaries, three of successive balls, but fell for 26 to a cleverly disguised slower ball from Collymore that provided a leg-side catch to Jacobs.
Atapattu followed 10 runs later to a neat second slip catch by Gayle off Drakes and Gayle was the fielder in the same position when Jayawardene became Edwards' first wicket.
Sri Lanka's situation should have been more dire at the first interval, and Taylor and his fellow Jamaicans spread around the stands a lot happier. But Taylor let a simple, two-handed return from his grasp when Sangakkara was 4.
Sri Lanka would have been hard-pressed to raise 150 had it been taken.
As it was, they batted with a glaring lack of confidence all through the afternoon, scoring 64 from 32 overs between intervals for the loss of three wickets.
Banks claimed two of them for 24 to edged, close catches from 15 consecutive overs. The impressive Collymore had the other.
The left-handed captain Hashan Tillakaratne fell to the classic off-spinner's dismissal, defending to a ball from round the wicket that spun to find the edge on its way to slip.
The little wicket-keeper Romesh Kaluwitherana was taken at leg-slip from the inside-edge off an intended cut.
Kumar Dharmasena's dismissal to a gully catch off Collymore's outgoing lifter just before tea seemed to commit Sri Lanka to a total below 200 but it needed Edwards and the new ball to prevent it advancing well over that.