Samuels has never been one to recoil from any on-field skirmish. Pushed into the lion's den aged 19 when he joined the 2000-01 tour of Australia, he had to fight on cricket's toughest battlefield. Led by the snarling Glenn McGrath, Australia's bowling attack regularly ran roughshod over almost every batting unit that engaged them on the Australian front. And with West Indies' glory days gone by then, the Caribbean challengers, despite the presence of the mercurial Brian Lara, were not expected to fare all that well.
Samuels would have had some inkling of the peril that laid in wait. About four years earlier, his elder brother Robert was himself forced to negotiate the hostile environment maintained by Mark Taylor' men when he opened the innings in four tests of the West Indies' 1996-97 five-Test tour. His 76 in Perth, batting for 332 minutes and facing 228 deliveries, was a significant triumph under the circumstances, but the left-hander reported that so crude was the babble in the middle that he sometimes wondered if the Australians were lecturing him on some topic having to do with sex.
But, if Robert was calm and diffident in the face of provocation, the younger Samuels was composed, confident, combative. He courteously replied to whatever chatter the Australians hurled in his direction and played his strokes with the fluency and poise that suggested a player more experienced, more accomplished than a teenager on his first tour with only a handful of first-class games to his name.
