Showing posts with label West Indies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Indies. Show all posts

Sunday 21 May 2023

Sri Lanka all out for 55 runs against West Indies at Sharjah

As everyone knows, even when you have a good day, you may also have a bad day. It is also true that Sri Lankan teams have sometimes failed miserably. Sri Lanka played West Indies at Sharjah on 3rd Dec 1986 in the 5th Champions Trophy match. Against the strong West Indian bowling lineup, it was a difficult target to reach. In the end, that's what happened. Sri Lanka never looked comfortable at 22 for no wicket but steadied the partnership to reach 45 for 2. After that, Courtney Walsh was incredible with the ball, as they were all out for just 55 runs. During his spell, he picked up five wickets and gave up just one run. In the end, Sri Lanka lost by 193 runs in that match. Malcom Marshall picked up a single, while Roger Harper had two for eight. 

Earlier Sri Lanka won the toss and decided to bowl first. 132 runs were added for the first wicket by the West Indian openers. Thanks to a strong opening partnership, the West Indies scored 248/5 runs. With 8 fours and 1 six, Richie Richardson scored 109 runs off 120 balls. Gordon Greenidge, his opening partner, scored 67 runs off 83 balls, including 7 boundaries. It was a 193-run victory for the West Indies. The first one-day international hundred for Richardson came after he was dropped at 0, 6, and 35. Asantha de Mel and Rumesh Ratnake both took 1 wicket each for Asantha Ratnake, he took 3 wickets for 59 runs. The match is umpired by two English umpires, Dickie Bird and David Shepherd. Against South Africa at Paarl, Sri Lanka scored 43 runs in a day-night game. Let's take a look at the Sri Lankan innings.

Wednesday 26 October 2022

Brian Lara (50 for 23 Balls) and Wavel Hinds (50 from 24 balls) in Beast Mood

Brian Lara and Wavell Hinds are in the beast mood to destroy Canada Bowling. Brian Lara scored 50 from 23 balls; however, Wavell Hinds scored 50 from 24 Balls. This was the 24th Match, of the ICC World Cup 2003 played at Centurion, on February 23, 2003. Let’s watch the brief highlights of both innings.

Earlier in the match, John Davison scored a famous century in front of an 11,630-strong crowd, were entertained for 98 unbelievable minutes as Davison, the Canadian Gilchrist, blushed West Indies with a blistering 111 off 76-ball, the fastest World Cup century at that time.

At one stage Canada was 2 for 155 in 20.6 overs, but once John Davison was out, the rest of the Canadian team all out at 202 in 42.5 overs. In reply, the West Indies batsman also outplayed Canadian bowling to achieve the target in just 20.3 overs. Wavell Hinds scored 64 off 31 balls, Brian Lara 73 in 40 Balls, and Sarwan scored 42 in 32 balls. West Indies won the match by 7 wickets with 177 balls remaining. John Davison was declared man of the match. 


Tuesday 25 October 2022

Richie Richardson - Destructive West Indies Batsman

Richie Richardson was a flamboyant batsman and superb player of fast bowling. Richie Richardson normally bats as Number Three for West Indies. In the fifth match of the ODI series against Australia at Georgetown in 1991, he smashed all Australian bowlers and scored a superb 94 runs off 88 balls in 112 minutes with the help of 11 fours and 1 six at the strike rate of 106.81. Richie Richardson's innings comes to an end by Merve Hughes, when Ian Healy took a stunning catch behind the wicket.

West Indies set the target of 251 in the allotted 50 overs. Australia chased the target in 48.3 overs and won the match by 6 wickets. Geoff Marsh scored 106 not out and was declared man of the match. Australia also won the 5-match ODI series by 4-1. This was ODI # 675. Let's watch short highlights of his innings. 


Sunday 11 September 2022

Carl Hooper was a terrific middle order batsman and off spinner.

CarlHooper was a terrific middle order batsman and off-spinner, who was known for his lazy elegance with both bat and ball. 



Tuesday 10 December 2019

Malcom Marshall - A Small Fearsome Bowler

One of the trickiest questions is who the best bowler was David Gower ever faced. Inevitably his mind turns to the West Indies quick men who gave him the most torrid times of my career. Trying to pick one out, given all their strengths and differences, is not easy but the palm would have to go to Malcolm Marshall.
I was far from the only batsman of my generation who felt like that. And perhaps most persuasively of all, his West Indian peers rated him ever so highly. Andy Roberts and Michael Holding both conceded that he was probably the best.
My respect and admiration for him was one of the reasons why in 1990 I joined Hampshire, where he had long been an established star – respect, admiration and an instinct for the preservation that saw this as a sure-fire way to reduce the chances of me having to face his bowling.
‘Macko’ had blistering pace when he wanted it and could pepper you with bouncers when he felt like it. But he also possessed the nous to temper that pace when conditions suggested he would fare better by slowing down, pitching the ball up and swinging it late both ways.
Everything about him was quick, from the sprinting run-up to the quick action to the ball that whistled around your ears. His instinct for assessing conditions was only matched by his knack for working out what tactics, and what field settings, worked best for each opponent. He knew his mind and knew what he was trying to do.
He was among the sharpest of competitors. Andy Roberts was credited with, pardon the pun, marshaling the long line of great Caribbean fast bowlers of the 1970's and 1980's. But Malcolm Marshall took things to a new level of sophistication.
They know about fast bowling in Bridgetown and I remember once watching him from the stands there playing for Barbados in an island game: he was moving the ball around to the alarm of the batsmen in an exhibition that had the small gathering of locals looking on with me purring their approval of a master technician at work.
What made him stand out? I reckon he was my equivalent of the previous generation facing Jeff Thomson in his pomp. ‘Thommo’ may have had a couple of miles an hour on Marshall but at the speeds at which they were operating that did not make a lot of difference.
The great thing about Thommo was that he would keep coming at you all day long, and he would keep getting a bounce. Marshall was the same: always coming. He had a lovely fluid action that disguised quite how much effort he was putting in and it was amazing that he never seemed to get tired. You needed to be aware of that extra effort. He wouldn’t necessarily bowl at the speed of light all day, but he could step things up at any moment if he wanted to.
David Gower remember at Antigua in ’1986 when England was battling to avoid yet another defeat at West Indian hands. I’d managed to bat a long time for 90 when out of nowhere on a docile pitch Marshall managed to bowl me a snorter of a bouncer – and one of those balls that ‘got big’.
In truth, I would contest the validity of the dismissal (honest!) as I was given out caught behind even though the ball narrowly missed my glove before flicking my shoulder. But it was the fact that Marshall had suddenly extracted so much extra bounce that produced the wicket.
Malcolm Marshall was relatively small for a fast bowler at 5ft 11in and this made him predominantly awkward. The Marshall bouncer tended to skid on to you. If a taller man dropped the ball short, there was a fair chance it would go over your head.
But his best bouncers gave you nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. A lot of people besides Mike Gatting, who once famously and painfully misjudged a hook shot against Marshall, found this out to their cost.
Malcolm Marshall broke my right wrist on that 1986 tour, although I didn’t realize it was broken until about a year later when an X-ray on another blow. However, this time from Merv Hughes, highlighted the damage. I just thought it hurt, a lot. I first came across him on a Young England tour of West Indies in 1976 and even though he was only 18 years old it was clear that he was someone I might be coming up against a lot more in the future.
In fact, because of the emergence of World Series, he was chosen to tour with West Indies just two years later after only one first-class appearance for Barbados. He had to wait a few years to become a regular in the Test side. But his early promotion meant that he was able to learn on the job from some of the finest of fast bowling minds. He also learned a lot from joining Hampshire as a replacement overseas player for Roberts.
His breakthrough year was 1983 when he took 21 wickets in a home Test series against India before hot-footing to England to take 134 wickets in the championship for Hampshire (it is now almost 50 years since anyone took more wickets in an English season – Derek Underwood with 136 in 1967 the last to have done so).
Shortly after, he took 33 wickets in six Tests in what are usually arduous fast bowling conditions in India, having been given the new ball for West Indies for the first time on the suggestion of Holding.
It was a role he relished and after that he just got better and better. Even though he was playing in a mighty the powerful attack, he regularly proved himself the dominant fast bowler on either side, never more so than during the 1988 series in England when he took 35 wickets in the five matches at just 12.65 apiece.
West Indies never lost a Test series in which he featured and by the time of his last Test in 1991 he stood as the leading wicket-taker in West Indies history to that point (376 in 81 matches), with an average of 20.94 unmatched by any out-and-out fast bowler of the 20th century.
Malcolm Marshall, raised by his mother and grandparents after his father died when he was an infant, grew up idolizing Garry Sobers but his dreams of becoming a fully-fledged all-rounder never quite materialized. Even if he was a more than useful lower-order batsman (he scored seven first-class hundreds, but his Test-best was 92).
He was a great cricketer but also a lovely man who gave his all for the teams he played for. He was mortified at missing out on Hampshire’s cup final wins of 1988 and 1991, especially as he had also tasted defeat by one run in the Nat West Trophy in 1990, but this made victory all the sweeter when it came in the Benson & Hedges Cup in 1992.
There was never any element of him keeping things to himself; on the contrary, he enjoyed sharing information and this made him a wonderful coach in his later years, notably at Natal where he mentored Shaun Pollock among others.
Malcolm Marshall early death from cancer in 1999 at the age of 41 was a desperate loss to all his many friends in the game and beyond. But he left memorable cricketing memories in their fans. He was a true legend of all time.
Read More 

Saturday 7 December 2019

Viv Richards West Indies, 1974 –1991

Of all the batsmen played in Test cricket, Viv Richards was the one you most feared would take the game away from you. He possessed a magnificent physique and a powerful personality and was highly driven by a fierce pride in being among the first Antiguans to represent West Indies. His close friend Andy Roberts having beaten him to the honor by a matter of months.
At a time when few West Indies cricketers had emerged from outside the main islands, they both knew there was something special about that. Later, when he took over the West Indies captaincy from Clive Lloyd, it was pried again that spurred him to build on the good work done by his predecessor and make sure the team maintained their pre-eminence.
Viv Richards quickly gained a fearsome reputation as a batsman, scoring 192 in his second Test match away to India before putting together a string of big scores in his annus mirabilis of 1976. Which he began by making runs against Denis Lillee and Jeoff Thomson in Australia as an opener. He later settled in the pivotal number 3 position behind Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes. And he crowned with an astonishing series in England in which he plundered 829 runs in just four Test matches, including a glorious 291 runs at The Oval.
That was his personal response to Tony Greig’s ill-advised prediction that England might make West Indies ‘grovel’. People learned to choose their words carefully when Viv was in the opposition. You’d come up against him on a handful of occasions in county cricket before, but the first-time bowler really experienced the full impact of his batting was in the World Cup final of 1979.  
When he played an innings of absolute brilliance, aided and abetted by Collis King. England had West Indies in some trouble before those two got together and England rather ran out of bowling! English bowler just couldn’t separate them, at least, not until it was too late, Viv finishing with marvelous 138 not out. There were to be a few more days like that, some of them when David Gower was captain and charged with setting fields to a man who could be impossible to contain.
The most extreme example of that came in a one-day international at Old Trafford in 1984, the first meeting of the sides that summer. On that occasion, England had them in even greater trouble at 166 for nine. What followed was a masterclass both in batting and in how to manage a difficult situation, with Viv Richard manipulating the strike in order to keep his partner – Michael Holding – out of trouble.
Amazingly Viv Richard was toying English bowlers: wherever captain put the fielders seemed to make no difference and during the last 14 overs of the innings that they stayed together Viv faced all but 27 balls and scored 93 of the 106 runs they put on. Viv Richards and Holding set the world record for the highest ever 10th wicket partnership in a one-day cricket history.
It was much the same two years later when he scored what was then the fastest Test hundred in history off 56 balls in his beloved Antigua later, the record was equaled, by Pakistan’s Misbah-ul-Haq, and then beaten by Brendon McCullum in 54 balls against Australia. Vivian Richard was the first all-rounder in ODI history, who took five wickets, and score a century.
Vivian Richards simply took the mickey. If you put the field out, he would run two; if you brought it in, he would hit the ball over the top for four or six. It was unbelievable, godlike stuff. Viv had a very distinctive batting style. Everyone thought they had a chance if they bowled straight at him because he liked to play across his front pad and work the ball to leg. Bowlers were sure he’d miss one, but he seldom did. The robust power was the other thing that struck you. He wasn’t particularly tall at 5ft 10in, but he had the shoulders of a boxer.
He never seemed intimidated by anyone or anything, even if he got hit, as occasionally he did in the Caribbean playing inter-island matches. He took the blows but never showed the pain and certainly never admitted to it. His decision to never wear a helmet during a period when every other player in the game wore one as a matter, of course, was an audacious statement of superiority and one he never had reason to regret.
Even at the age of 38, playing in the championship for Glamorgan against Hampshire, his eye was good enough for him to take 14 off the last over from Malcolm Marshall – four, six, four – to win a game. As they thought we’d had in the bag. Going into the last hour Glamorgan, five wickets down, still needed 112 to win and we thought Viv Richards had miscalculated: fat chance.
He took pride in launching vendetta-like assaults on the best fast bowler in an attack, as Bob Willis discovered to his cost during the 1980 series in England. Viv learned a a lot from the mauling West Indies suffered at the hands of Lillee and Thomson in Australia in 1975–76.
Where they lost five of the six Tests, but also from World Series, which is where he would have had some of his severest tests. In 14 World Series “Supertests” Viv scored 1,281 runs at an average of 55.69, a record that none except Greg Chappell and Barry Richards could remotely match.
In the official Test cricket, his return was 8,540 runs and 24 hundred, and at the time he was chaired off the field has drawn the 1991 series in England 2–2 to ensure he maintained his record of never losing a series as captain, only two batsmen had scored more runs in Tests and only three had made more hundreds. Whether or not he was captain, Viv Richards embraced the role of leader, both within his team and in the wider sense of representing the people of the Caribbean.
The West Indian community may not have heaped expectations on his shoulders in quite the same way as the Indian population did with Sachin Tendulkar. However, nevertheless a lot of hope was invested in his performances and he rarely let his public down. In fact, he improved pretty much every team he played for, including Somerset (whom he helped win their first trophies before the relationship soured and he was controversially sacked), the Leeward Islands, Queensland, and Glamorgan.
Sporadically, his pride spilled over into strange territory, with him once failing to lead out his West Indies team because he had gone to the press box to harangue an English journalist about something he had written, but he was by and large a principled man with a fiercely competitive streak. There was so much more to him than simply his batting and captaincy, useful off-spin bowling and brilliant fielding, initially in the covers, later at slip.
The first-time thousands of people were aware of him was when he executed three brilliant run-outs during the 1975 World Cup final. He remains the only West Indian to score 100 hundred in first-class cricket. In 1986, he was the first batsman who scored a Test century with a mind-blowing strike rate of 156.
Vivian Richard was born on March 7, 1952, in Antigua. Viv was the greatest batsman of all time, voted one of the five cricketers of the Century by a 100 members panel of cricket expert in 2000. The other two were, Sir Donald Bradman, Shane Warne, Sir Gary Sobers, and Sir Jack Hobbs. Viv Richard was first ODI batsman, who has won 20 Man of the Match awards.
Viv Richards was very impressive in both forms of cricket. He was managed to score 8,540 runs in 121 Test matches with an average of 50.23 including 24 centuries and 45 fifties. As a West Indies captain, his record is so impressive by winning 27 Test matches out of 50 Test matches and just lost 8 matches.
More than 36,000 runs in first-class cricket with 114 centuries with the highest score of 322. Also, nearly 7,000 runs including 11 hundred with the 189* highest score in One Day cricket truly speak his greatness. Moreover, Vivian Richards was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame in 2009. Furthermore, he was a very useful right-arm off-spin bowler, and occasionally he took the priceless wickets. He took 118 wickets at 35.83 in 187 ODI matches.
Read More 

Thursday 28 August 2014

Sunil Narine became first Bowler in T20 to bowl a Maiden Super Over.



West Indies off spinner Sunil Narine became the first bowler in T20 cricket history to bowl a maiden over in a super over. The match was Red Steel versus Guyana Amazon Warriors of the Caribbean Premier League at Providence on Thursday 21 August 2014. Earlier in the day, the Dwayne Bravo-led Red Steel franchise removed the words “Trinidad & Tobago” from their name on a minister's request. But the name change did not prove enough for the team. The scores were tied after the stipulated 20 overs a side, with Red Steel 118/8 and Guyana Amazon Warriors at 118/9. And then, the Steels came up against the wily spin of Sunil Narine.

Saturday 12 July 2014

James Anderson Shines in the Modern Era of No 11.



James Anderson a well composed 81 runs, aside as the highest score by an English No.11 and the third-highest by any in that position. Jimmy Anderson faced 130 balls actually second-most by an English No.11. His partnership with Joe Root produced 198 runs, a world record for the tenth-wicket. They were together for 360 balls, the most by a tenth-wicket pair in Tests, and the only instance of a last wicket pair playing 300 or more deliveries. Moreover; the tenth-wicket pairs from both sides accumulated 309 runs, the most runs scored for the final wicket in a Test. In a rare occurrence, the only other No.11 batsman to score a Test fifty for England is John Snow. He scored an unbeaten 59 against West Indies at The Oval in 1966. John Snow and Ken Higgs shared a final-wicket stand of 128. Jimmy Anderson maiden half-century was only the 2nd instance of a No.11 batsman reaching the mark against India. Wes Hall had made an unbeaten 50 at Port of Spain in 1962. Wes Hall then also took the first five wickets, reducing India to 30/5.
Wes Hall is the only player other than James Anderson to have scored a fifty against India while batting at No.11. © Getty Images

James Anderson had a great day at Nottingham and shines in the sunny day © Getty Images