As you have mentioned yourself earlier in this thread, accuracy does not always translate to improved ERs. Australia are an aggressive team and as such on flatter tracks it is not improbable to suggest that they would be scoring at those rates. Whilst Harmison did bowl a tad too short on many occasions in that series, on the whol his performance outside of Lords was accurate but unthreatening.
There may have been 1 or 2 occasions he did bowl reasonably accurately, but much of the time he barely bowled at all. Why? Because the rest of the attack was keeping the Australian batsmen under the pump far more than he was, and not just because they were getting more movement, because they were generally putting it in better areas.
The reason behind said argument was to counter the argument made that Gayle was actually out of sorts. 2.5 years down the road, Gayle is still as rubbish as he has always been against quality swing or seam and his inability to tackle Harmison could best be defined as unsurprising. I would venture to suggest that even today if we were to put Harmison in those conditions that were on offer 4 years ago, Harmison would still come out trumps against Gayle whilst also bowling well enough to get another 7/12.
And I still don't think Gayle's poor scores that series had much to do with seam-movement. Was there seam-movement? Yes, plenty. But most of Gayle's dismissals were due to poor strokes - to average balls, not seaming ones. And given that he does at least normally have little trouble with unthreatening bowling, I do think his form that series was less good than it has been at other times.
You dont need to bowl countless wicket taking deliveries to bowl well. There were deliveries such as the one that got Jacobs in the first test that would get most batsmen out.
To my mind, if someone gets 7 wickets of which just 1 was a genuine wicket-taking delivery (not saying it neccessarily was - I don't recall all 7 of those wickets exactly any more) they haven't bowled terribly well. As I said - there's not a lot about that series I remember too well now, but only 1 Harmison delivery comes back to me terribly clearly, that being the inswinger he removed Gayle with in the second-innings at Kensington Oval. I might re-watch some of the stuff sometime actually, to re-acquaint myself.
I dont see the logic behind someone not scoring runs =them batting poorly. He got some good deliveries during that series, as well as the series in England and as such he struggled for the majority of both series.
Lara looked, to me, completely out of form in the Sabina Park and Queen's Park Oval Tests. It wasn't (at least, it wasn't only) that he wasn't scoring runs - he simply was not getting the middle of the bat to the ball very often, looked like he often does when out of nick, in that the usual jump looked awkward and sometimes went too far accross, and often looked rattled by average deliveries. In the Kensington Oval Test, he looked far, far better, and I remember clearly everyone commenting on it. But he got a good ball from Flintoff in the first-innings then got left with the tail in the second. Then at St.John's, everything fell perfectly into place.