Cricket is a funny game!

How often have we heard that phrase on TV? And most often than not it turns out to be true. Usually it's the X factor of India that makes the game unpredictable, but today it was the turn of England and West Indies. The victory fashioned by the heroics of Bradshaw and Browne will certainly become a part of cricketing folklore, but whether it will lead to the revitalization of West Indian cricket is open to question. I for one certainly doubt it. Over the past decade, when the Carribeans have been known to be on the wane, their Test record has gone from bad to worse but their record in ODIs hasn't taken that much of a beating. This has primarily been because one-day cricket is more or less a batsman's game now and though the standards of the Windies bowling has plummeted, their batting has remained pretty solid. They have Gayle to blast away in the first 15 overs and their middle order has 3 giants in Sarwan, Lara and Chanderpaul, and finally they have Powell to handle the slog overs. So, the Windies have maintained a pretty decent record in ODIs, chasing down huge totals on several occasions.

The same cannot be said about their performance in Tests though and even though they might be the "Champions" of world cricket now, their dismal showing in Tests is going to continue. Their lacklustre bowlers can do a decent job of containment in ODIs but fail to pick up wickets in Tests, leading to opposition amassing huge totals regularly. Having conceded a humongous amount of runs, the batsmen are almost always under immense pressure and more often than not the whole lineup just rolls over under such immense pressure. Ironically, in today's triumph in the final, all the batsmen failed, and it was the bowlers who performed both jobs of whittling down the English batting order and then accummulating the required runs once their batsmen failed! However, clearly the odds of this happening with regularity are pretty slim. Anyway, cricket does prove itself to be a funny game yet again. When the Champions trophy started off a couple of weeks back, who the hell in their wildest dreams would have picturised the West Indies to emerge as champions!

Cheers,
Harsha