Sunday 04 / May / 2025
It was an easy job for whoever it was to pick the player of the match in the one-off T20 game played at Sabina Park on Sunday. There was just one nominee for the award: Evin Lewis. On the other hand, the guy or the guys entrusted with the task, if at all, of naming the villain would have had a hard time in picking the right man from a pack of equals in crime.
From MS Dhoni who missed two stumping opportunities to Virat Kohli who failed as captain to use effectively the resources at his disposal to pull the plug on the Lewis show, the all-Indian nominations could possibly have at least five, with Mohammed Shami, Rishabh Pant and Dinesh Karthik being the others.
India raced to 50 inside the first five overs and even when both Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan departed in the sixth, the score was a hefty 66. In contrast, the West Indies managed only 17 runs in the first three overs, and it was the fourth over bowled by Shami that swang the momentum in favour of Lewis. Shami gave away 19 runs in that single, doomed spell.
The Indian innings lost tempo as two guys, one getting his first chance and the other making a comeback after seven years, tried to make their mark. Pant’s innings was a progression from one blunder to another with incredible quickness. It was difficult to keep count of his blushes, but the ones such as the way he got Dhawan out — he made the call for a run and backed out leaving the other to make an impossible dash back to the crease — and the big hits that sent his bat, not the ball, into the air, as well as the manner in which he finally got himself out, would stay in the mind for some time.
How the teenager eager to step into Dhoni’s shoes failed to execute one single shot that announced his arrival on the international sage off the 35 balls he had faced is a mystery.
Karthik scored 48 off 29, which was the top score on the Indian side, but when only 27 runs were added in four overs from the seventh to the 10th, and when he could not convert the time he took to play himself in to a big innings, the writing on the Indian wall against the backdrop of a ground with short boundaries and guys famed for brute power was large and bold.
And then there was that ridiculous, identical tale of two dropped catches. Lewis was on 46 and 55 when he skied the ball and the fielders — Kohli, Shami and Karthik — failed to lap it up. In the first instance, Kohli and Shami went for the ball with neither really managing to grab it and, in the second, Karthik spilled the catch, obviously getting disrupted by the fear of colliding with another fielder — Kohli.
Why didn’t the fielders make a call to keep the others out of the picture? Players involved were not anyone a bit wet behind the ears, but veterans with years of international experience.
Dhoni wasted two stumping opportunities: one right in the second over and the other in the 16th. Chris Gayle made a charge at Ravichandran Ashwin and missed, but the Indian keeper could not collect the ball to effect the stumping, with Gayle clearly outside the crease. At the start of the 16th over, the West Indies needed 42 runs from 30 balls, and a wicket, in this case, that of Marlon Samuels, at that stage would have shifted the momentum.
Shami was brought into the attack in the fourth over, after Bhuvaneshwar Kumar and Ashwin restricted the rivals to just 17 after three overs, and gave away 19 runs that put a spring back in Lewis step. Inspired by the windfall, the opener tossed out his ODI woes and went after the bowlers in the next eight overs to set his team on course, posting 117 on the board at the end of the 12th over for the loss of just one wicket. Ravindra Jadeja put the brakes in the 13th over yielding just two runs, but the advantage was wasted as Shami, brought back into the attack, leaked 16 in the next over.
When Shami and Kohli rushed to the ball and spoiled the chance in the sixth over, Lewis was miles away from his eventual, match-winning score of 125. Kohli could have tossed the ball to Kedar Jadhav when regular guys failed either to provide a breakthrough or to curb the run flow. The ideal time was the 14th over, after Jadeja’s fine effort in the previous. When things were not working and reliable bowlers flopped, the captain needed to come up with a move that changed the course. Kohli seemed to have suffered brain-freeze, and he must look to space out not just the gaps between his batting mistakes but the frequency of his mind-fade.
The Indian villains in the Caribbean piece are lucky that the bitter memories of their mistakes and the scrutiny and criticism they might face over their shortcomings could be blotted out with just one good show. They need not wait for long to make it happen as the tour of Sri Lanka is just a few days away. What an opportunity it’s going to be against a young, inexperienced team getting beaten on home soil nowadays even by Zimbabwe.
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The writer is a freelance contributor based in India. All the views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of Times of Oman
