Not often has one seen the usually unflappable Chris Gayle come close to fuming in anger. If Dhoni is ice-cool on the cricket field, Gayle is probably many degrees cooler. And so when he does have a thing or two to say in anger about his team members, then, the entire West Indies listens. So do the selectors, hopefully.
The West Indian cricket has seen quite a lot of struggle in the recent times, and so when the main team returned back to international cricket in the Test series against Australia, one almost hoped against hope that they would prove to be a handful for the opposition. And they were indeed, as the score-line of 0-2 against them could have easily been 1-2 or even 1-1 with some luck.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last for too long. The ODIs against Australia were all lost convincingly and so were the two T20Is. Even if one thought that one would be expecting too much against a rather powerful Australian side in the shorter format, the least one would have wanted to see was for the West Indian side to win all the six games against Zimbabwe – a T20I and five ODIs.
Two games into the series, the West Indian side had lost the one-off T20I and the first ODI; the former due to the ineptitude of the batsmen to handle spin bowling – even while chasing 100 odd runs in a T20 game – and the second due to a stroke play so horrendous and choice of shots so blatantly ridiculous that not even Gayle could have controlled his pent-up emotions. So much so that it would give the West Indies-Kenya game of the 1996 World Cup a run for its money!
One almost gets a sense that the T20s and the like have earned the likes of Dwayne Smith and Kieron Pollard enough money to last them a lifetime and for now, they couldn’t care less about their exclusion from the international side.
The series between India and South Africa may have finished, but the tourists would have returned back with many more questions than they have answers to.
And quite many of those would be pertaining to their rather below-par bowling attack that failed to penetrate through the Indian batting which was shorn of Yuvraj Singh, Gautam Gambhir, Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar at different times during the ODIs.
Even if one discounts Tendulkar’s majestic knock in the second ODI and the flat-seeming tracks throughout the series, none of the bowlers, including Dale Steyn have seemed anything but flatter than any of the national highways around the world.
Albie Morkel has been a major letdown for some time in the shorter format, and it took only one game for him to be dropped, while Wayne Parnell may be a reasonable option in the T20 format of the game, but the ODIs look like a distant dream for him. At least for now. Around a year back, Johan Botha was leading the South African side, but many a changed actions later, he has failed to throttle the runs as he was so famous for.
The South Africans will be in the cognizance of the fact that in an year from now, the World Cup will be played on pitches which will not be too dissimilar from the ones they encountered in the ODI series. And if they do not take back some lessons from this, and more importantly learn from them, winning their first ever World Cup could just turn into a distant dream.
