Just when you thought that the 2012 ICC World T20 champions West Indies had gotten their groove back by defeating three formidable opponents, England, Sri Lanka, and South Africa in Group One of the 2016 T20 ICC championship tournament in India, we were rudely fed a dose of reality on Sunday when they suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Afghanistan at Nagpur. West Indies wasted a decent performance by their spinners right arm leggie Samuel Badree – 3 for 14 and lanky left arm Sulieman Benn – 1 for 18 that restricted the Afghans to 123 for 7, as they struggled in a nervous response to end on 117 for 8, badgered throughout by three garden variety spinners Amir Hamza – 1 for 9, and Mohammad Nabi and Rashid Khan each finishing with 2 for 26.
Debutant Evin Lewis appeared out of his league while Johnson Charles, after a reasonable start, manifested poor technique and a lack of patience as did the mercurial Marlon Samuels and the sometimes mindless Dinesh Ramdin in their failure. Skipper Darren Sammy, who is yet to make a major contribution in this year’s tournament, dismissing the team’s poor performance as a ‘blip’ on the radar, said “We have to leave this game in Nagpur.
“There is a new focus now which is the semi-finals. “This”, said he, “is the first step and we just have to be ready for India in Mumbai.”
One indeed wonders whether last Sunday’s appalling effort by the Windies was just a ‘blip’ or was it a case of ‘old habits die hard’, or déjà vu all over again.
Whatever the case Sammy and his talented prototype T20 team – one of the world’s best on paper even without the wily mystery spinner Sunil Narine and his countryman all-rounder Kieron Pollard, and one that has been among the pre-tournament favorites, must – much like a baseball pitcher who has just been hit for a grand slam homerun, or a cornerback in American football who has just been torched by a wide receiver for a long touchdown, or a goal-keeper who just let one into the net, must have a short memory and be ready for the very next
