Those of us in the Caribbean who sat through the early hours of Saturday morning to watch the last of the four quarter finals in this year’s Cricket World Cup Tournament knew only too well that the outcome that we wanted, had hoped for, could come only through some miracle or else on the back of a West Indies performance on the field that rose head and shoulders above the mediocrity which had characterized the team’s ungainly entry into the quarter finals stage of the competition.
It was, perhaps, the miracle that came closest to materializing. With the benefit of hindsight and nothing more, one can argue that had Marlon Samuels held on to the very early Martin Guptil chance when the latest New Zealand batting star was on four, that might have presented the West Indies with a far less formidable mountain to climb though, even had the catch been taken, only a brave man would have predicted a different outcome to the game.
The result had been determined long before last Saturday morning, and in the days that preceded the encounter, it was Darren Sammy’s Mike Tyson v Buster Douglas upset analogy that dominated the pre-match chatter here in the Caribbean. The once mighty West Indies were being cast in a giant-killing role against a team that they had grown used to bettering in all versions of the game. Characteristically loud-mouthed Caribbean fans had been reduced to silently praying for a miracle. We were witnessing the ultimate climbdown.
Guptil’s thorough appreciation of Samuels’ generosity was reflected in the brutality with which he took an inept West Indies’ bowling attack ‘to the cleaners.’ It was always likely that one of New Zealand’s top order batsmen would do just that to a bowling attack which, in the earlier round of the tournament had suffered its fair share of roughing up by the opposition.
There were many things wrong with the quality of our bowling, not least the pre-tournament decision by Sunil Narine to exclude himself from the squad, the woeful underperformance of Kemar Roach and the ineffectiveness of our ‘death’ bowling.
Long before our swansong at the World Cup, the writing had been indelibly scrawled on the wall. We had put together a team for the game that had been shuffled to take account of the need for compulsory adjustment arising out of earlier individual underperformances. Far too late in the piece Lendl Simmonds had been promoted up the order and Dwayne Smith’s persistent misfiring had left the team with the lack of that top order impetus which had been winning games for the other better teams in the tournament.
On Friday evening the West Indies had trotted out its magnificent but hobbling Gladiator, Chris Gayle. That Gayle was included was a tribute to the selectors’ acknowledgement that he is the team’s talisman, the likeliest miracle-worker. It was a dead giveaway that the West Indies were truly hoping for something out of the ordinary. As it happened Martin Guptil made it a miracle too many for Gayle. Indeed, if anything, what was, in all likelihood, Gayle’s final Cricket World Cup innings, might well be a precursor to his retirement from playing with the West Indies. His innings of 61 was an example – albeit a far too fleeting one in the circumstances – of the kinds of bludgeoning stand-and-deliver innings for which he is famous. Gayle, as it happens, is only human.
There is really little need to overanalyse the weekend’s loss to New Zealand. The evidence suggests that Guptil and company simply put us out of our misery and if, perhaps, we might have found the manner of the slaughter hard to take, at the end of the day, what transpired on the weekend was one of those repeated and poignant reminders of the state of our game.
What the 2015 Cricket World Cup did was once again to put the cataclysmic decline of our cricket on display to the rest of the world and to remind us at home that we are at a point where the ‘big guns’ in the game have left us trailing in their wake, and that it will not be easy for us to recover the ground that they have put between us and themselves. And even if we never abandon our propensity for loudmouthed ‘bigging up’ of the West Indies team we can do worse than grow accustomed to the reality that things are not what they used to be.
