Sri Lanka vs West Indies: Tale of a Victor
“Silence of the Lions”
“Samuels pummel Lankans”
“West Indies prove the threat right and dance on Sri Lankan graveyard”
These were some of the headlines on 8th October, 2012 of some popular newspapers describing the defeat of Sri Lanka at the hands of the mighty West Indies. This article tries to find what worked for the teams and what just didn’t go well.
Things looked to be in Sri Lanka’s Favor
It was West Indies who came on to bat first on a slow wicket, which was going to be slower gradually as the match progresses. All eyes were on the flamboyant opener of West Indies, Chris Gayle, as everyone out there were expecting another Gayle-storm. West Indies had lost 4 times against Sri Lanka in their previous T20 encounters, all in a World Cup. The onus was always on West Indies to put their house in order.
In an encounter of this eminence anyone can falter and so did Gayle. He made only 3 runs off 16 balls thus on the way getting to his lowest strike rate ever in T20 whenever he had scored a single or more runs. The slow flat wicket was favorable for the Lankan spinner Ajantha Mendis, who registered best bowling figures (4 wickets for 12 runs) in a T20 World Cup Final. Earlier this record was held by India’s Irfan Pathan (3 wickets for 16 runs) against Pakistan in 2007.
In 10 overs, West Indies had made only 32 runs and with Gayle already back in the pavilion, Sri Lanka was dominating heavily until the tide took a turn as Marlon Samuels entered.
West Indies Fight Back
Marlon Samuels’ blitzkrieg helped West Indies past 105 runs in the last 10 overs as they trudged to a total of 137. In his innings of 78 runs off 56 balls, Samuels had hit the ball out of the park as many as 6 times for sixes and also scored 3 boundaries. His heroics helped the West Indies come out of a humiliating performance and gave his team something to fight on, which eventually proved to be too much for Sri Lanka.
During his innings of 78 runs, Samuels became the highest scorer in a World T20 Final. This record was also previously held by an Indian, Gautam Gambhir for his 75 runs off 54 balls against Pakistan in 2007. In his innings, he scored 6 sixes in all, of which 5 were hit against Lasith Malinga, one of the best bowler in T20’s. Malinga had never been hit for 5 sixes which proved to be the real dent in their hopes of winning the final. Malinga’s bowling figures read 54 runs off 4 overs with no wicket. This was the first instance when he gave away more than 50 runs. What a bad day he had chosen to give his worst performance.
Lankans were never in the chase
Even though the target of 138 was really small considering Lanka’s batting deposits, West Indies bowled beautifully to keep the batsmen in check all the time. Dilshan went for a duck when his valuable innings was needed most by the team. Mahela Jayawardena and Kumara Sangakkara tried to hold the innings in a consistent manner but couldn’t last long as Kumara departed after making 22 runs. After that it was just an affair of “You go, I’ll be there in a minute” for the upcoming Lankan batsmen. Mahela top-scored for his team with 33 runs.
In the encounter, there were 2 run outs back to back in just two deliveries. A team should never provide such silly instances of failures but it seemed that the Lankans just didn’t have the nerves to cross this last hurdle consecutively for the fourth time. This was Lanka’s 4th World Cup Final in past 5 years and all have resulted in losses.
The tail did wag for some time with Nuwan Kulasekara scoring his career best of 26 runs in T20’s, but Sri Lanka were all out with the scoreboard reading just 101 runs.
What followed the victory?
West Indies won a World Cup after 1979, a gap of 33 years, and so the celebrations had to be purely in the Caribbean style. The team was dancing Gangnam Style all over the park with 35,000 people inside the stadium left for gaping in disbelief over their team’s 4th failure.
Many Sri Lankan’s on Facebook and Twitter blamed their own President Mahinda Rajpakse for their team’s loss. The presence of the President in the stadium during the final was marred by the fact that Lanka had lost previous 2 finals whenever he had witnessed the match in the stadium. This time there was great confusion over whether he will attend the match or not but all hell broke loose when Lanka lost and Mr.President was present in the stadium. A fan on Twitter tweeted, “Again the same story”, related to the above incident.
Congratulations to the West Indies Cricket team!