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Babar Azam’s Pakistan on Tuesday won the four-match series 1-0 but it was the weather that once again had the last laugh at the National Stadium in Providence, Guyana.
Pakistan managed as many as three complete overs against Kieron Pollard’s West Indies. It was better than the eight balls the teams managed on Sunday but not quite as many as the nine overs completed in Wednesday’s 1st T20I in Barbados.
With both teams unchanged from Sunday’s water-soaked eight-ball debacle, Azam called correctly and again invited the home side to take first strike.
The home side progressed rapidly to 30 without loss off one over of spin and two of pace.
Presumably acutely aware of his perceived vulnerability against the slower stuff, Andre Fletcher twice blasted off-spinner Mohammad Hafeez over the ropes in his first over. In the first game on Wednesday, Hafeez had bowled him like a dunce after he had twice suffered the same fate against Australian leg-spinner Adam Zampa in the previous series.
Azam replaced the off-spinner with Hasan Ali, who managed to restrict the Grenadian opener to a single boundary before the heavens decided enough was enough.
At the other end, Chris Gayle had no such perceived susceptibility to pace to inspire him. Having taken a pair of fours off Mohammad Wasim Jr, he would get no further chance to show off his wares.
And so a generally unsatisfying series, which yielded a mere 80 balls of cricket apart from Saturday’s exciting Game 2 which the tourists won by 7 runs, came to an unsatisfactory end.
And it was doubly unsatisfying for long-serving West Indies all- rounder Dwayne Bravo who, his skipper revealed, was playing his last match in front of a Caribbean audience and would have liked to go out in style as befits a champion.
Bravo will not be in action when the two teams go on to Jamaica for two Tests, the first of which begins next Thursday, 12 August, and the second on the following Friday, 20 August.
A two-time T20I World Cup winner, Bravo represented the West Indies in 40 Tests (2,200 runs and 86 wickets); 164 ODIs (2,968 runs and 199 wickets) and 85 T20Is (1,229 runs and 76 wickets).
(via CWI Media)
MATCH SUMMARY
Toss: Pakistan
West Indies: 30 for 0 (3 overs) (A. Fletcher 17*, C Gayle 12*)
Pakistan: DNB
Result: No result
Pakistan win four-match series 1-0
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Earl Best taught cricket, French, football and Spanish at QRC for many years and has written consistently for the Tapia and the Trinidad and Tobago Review since the 1970’s.
He is also a former sports editor at the Trinidad Guardian and the Trinidad Express and is now a senior lecturer in Journalism at COSTAATT.
