Friday 5 February 2010

West Indies show their caliber in the inconsequential game

Well hardly anyone would have thought that the Chris Gayle led West Indies team would thrash the Mathew Hayden led PM's XI and that too by a huge margin of 90 runs. But, this did happen at Canberra which has rarely made news when it comes to hosting international cricket matches and is found making one when it hosted the one stated above. Anyways, coming to the game, what a fabulous performance it was by the West Indies team and Chris Gayle especially who belted 146 runs with a strike rate of 150+? This could not be even dreamed by anyone I suppose.

Needless to be said, the pitch did favor the batsman which is evident when even the opposition was also able to put up a score in excess of 300+ on the board. West Indies fell just 1 run short of putting up a score of 400+ on board when they had to bat for just 45 overs as against the stipulated 50 overs a side owing to bad weather. It would not be a unique say that the total of the West Indies team total would have well passed 400 had they played the stipulated 50 overs a side. But, it would be surely a good feeling for the West Indies captain that he need not go home empty handed at the end of the tour.

With the result of the ODI series between Australia and Pakistan well in front of us, nothing is needed to be said specially regarding the ODI series between Australia and the West Indies that is bound to start in the coming week or so. Finally, at the end of the match, the man of the match had to be shared between Chris Gayle and Tom Cooper from the PM's XI side for his 160 runs. This I guess is the second time in the recent past that there have been batsmen from both the sides put together top scoring with 146 and 160 respectively.

It was in the first one dayer between India and Sri Lanka where Virender Sehwag from India scored 146 and Tilekeratne Dilshan from Sri Lanka scored 160 runs at Rajkot. Here as well, it was from the team that atted first that recorded a score of 146 and a batsman from the team that batted second returned with a score of 160. However, unlike in the match between WI and PM's XI, the man of the match was not shared between Virender Sehwag and Tilekaratne Dilshan despite deserving to. And, one has to finally applaud the Duckworth-Lewis method which could set a target of 403 for the PM's XI team to chase down with both teams batting for 45 overs.

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