Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.
By Tony McWatt
Three strikes and you’re out. That’s the baseball rule that could now very well be in operational effect for Phil Simmons and his West Indies coaching staff. If so, the West Indies’ embarrassing 42 runs shock loss to Scotland in their opening match of the 2022 ICC T20 World Cup will surely be seen as the first strike, center nail in the contract termination coffin for Simmons and his batting and bowling coach assistants Monty Desai and Roddy Estwick.
Long-suffering West Indies cricket fans have been unhappy witnesses to the unending downwards spiralling of the team’s fortunes for almost three decades. Losing by as wide a margin as 42 runs to Scotland as the ICC’s 15th ranked team, in the T20I format they were once considered to be the owners of, must however now represent an all-time previously unfathomable low.
The factors that contributed to the West Indies’ loss should not, however, have come as a major surprise to anyone. They have been that much of a reoccurring theme in West Indies’ T20I performances since their last World Cup championship triumph way back in 2016.
Needing to win their Scotland opening match as a means of emerging as one of the top two Group B teams to advance to the World Cup’s Super12 stage, the West Indies started on a dubious note. Choosing to offer their opponents to take first strike on a track that commentator Samuel Badree had described in his pitch report as “good for batting!” the associated negativity of that highly questionable decision was then immediately compounded by the absolute insanity of the choice of Kyle Mayers to bowl the first over.
Repeated performance of a proven ineffective activity with the expectation of a different result has often been cited as the definition of insanity. In the 11 overs he’s bowled to date in T20I matches for the West Indies, Kyle Mayers has never taken a single wicket. Moreover, his economy rate for those eleven over bowled has been a whopping 9.36.
Yet in their infinite wisdom, or lack thereof, the West Indies Brain Trust of Coach Simmons et al have continued their ploy of using Mayers as a T20I opening bowler, despite its repeated and obvious failure. Mayers’ first over to Scotland’s opening pair of George Munsey and Michael Jones went for 9. His second was even more expensive, yielding 16. By the time he was eventually withdrawn from the attack at the end of the fourth over, Scotland had already gotten off to a flyer with their score at 42/0-4, scoring by then at more than 10 runs per over.
The decision to use Mayers as the opening bowler was one of two made by skipper Pooran, presumably under the direction of Simmons and his bowling coach Roddy Estwick, that were ill-advised. The second was the equally dubious choice of Odean Smith to bowl the twentieth and final over of the innings.
By then Scotland had progressed to 145/5-19, restricted as they had been to scoring only 63 runs for the loss of three additional wickets in the crucial middle overs from 7-14. This after they had ended the first six-over Power Play on 54/0.
The very admirable restriction of Scotland’s middle innings scoring had been fashioned by some excellent bowling particularly by Jason Holder 3/14-3 and Alzharri Joseph 2/28-4. Joseph’s eventual figures represented an impressive comeback after he had been struck for 15 in his first over. A victim of the momentum that had been granted to Munsey by the gifts of Mayers’ innocuous bowling.
Akheal Hosein, 0/31-4 and Obed McCoy 0/25 -3 were the other two bowlers used by skipper Pooran by the time the innings had progressed to its twentieth and final over. Despite Smith’s well-established history of being overly expensive when bowling the death overs of an innings, he was, however, surprisingly given the responsibility instead of either Holder or McCoy who were then both left without having completed their respective allocations of four overs each.
Mayers two overs cost 24 runs while Smith’s final over went for 15. Noticeably the cumulative total of Mayers’ two overs and Smith’s final was 39. Coincidentally almost exactly equal to Scotland’s 41 run victory margin.
Even for a batting unit such as the West Indies that has struggled of late to post totals in excess of 150, the 161-run victory target set by Scotland on a track that had played true and shown absolutely no signs of any devilish behaviour should have been fairly easy to achieve. Their response was to be led by the experienced Evin Lewis, accompanied by the underachieving Mayers at the top of the order. Despite his unenviable average of 23.71 from an aggregate of 394 runs scored in 18 T20I innings batted, Mayers had been described by Samuel Badree as having “impressed everyone who has seen him!”
Once again Mayers flattered to deceive as the West Indies T20I opener, striking a four and a six off the second and third balls of Josh Davey only to be caught on the boundary of the fourth. Mayers was gone for his typical breezy, but equally short-lived 20, scored off of just 13 balls with three fours and one six to leave the West Indies at 1/20-2.4 overs.
A second wicket partnership of 33 between Evin Lewis 14 (13) and Brandon King 17 (15) took the West Indies to 55 off of 5.5 overs, a mini recovery of sorts. Once the experienced but obviously still out of touch Lewis had departed, however, wickets then fell in their now customary heap.
As they had done in both of their losing causes to Australia in the two-match Series that had preceded the World Cup opener, the West Indies once again made an absolute mess of their middle innings batting. Losing a further 6 wickets for the addition of only 36 runs during overs 7-14.
By the time the last five overs were about to commence, the West Indies’ innings was already irretrievably faltering at 89/8 in comparison to Scotland’s 117/3 at the exact same stage. Jason Holder struck a defiant 38 (33) that included one six and four boundaries but his effort was in vain. Scotland’s unextraordinary bowling scythed through the West Indies’ feeble batting as effortlessly as a hot knife through butter to record their historic win in the first-ever T20I meeting between the two teams.
The loss to Scotland has left the West Indies needing to win both of its remaining Group B fixtures against Zimbabwe and Ireland on October 17 and 19 respectively. In his post-match Media conference following the loss to Scotland, Coach Simmons called on his West Indies batsmen to “wake up and be professional!”
Having played as many as twenty-four T20I matches, in comparison to just two by the Scots, before the sides met in their World Cup Group B opening encounter, the question to be asked of Simmons is as to how exactly he now plans to waken his West Indies batting charges from their apparent continuing slumber. It will now indeed be very interesting to see to what degree the overall lack of professionalism by the West Indies batsmen as has been displayed over that many matches can be sufficiently corrected for their next must-win encounter, occurring as it will be a mere two days later.
It will also be interesting to see how much longer it will now take for Simmons himself to accumulate the proverbial two strikes that might signal a premature end to his tenure as the West Indies Head Coach. Or conversely, to what extent he can emerge as a hero by salvaging the West Indies’ seemingly already faltering 2022 T20 World Cup campaign to any acceptable degree.
About The Writer: Guyana-born, Toronto-based, Tony McWatt is the Publisher of both the WI Wickets and Wickets/monthly online cricket magazines that are respectively targeted toward Caribbean and Canadian readers. He is also the only son of the former Guyana and West Indies wicket-keeper batsman the late Clifford “Baby Boy” McWatt.
