Smith's plan was for West Indies to declare at their second-day score of 248 for 7. He would then forego an Australian second innings, "bowl lob ups for seven or eight overs or whatever it was" and offer an equation of 370 off 70 overs to win, at a required rate of 5.28.
It was a flawed idea for a couple of reasons. Ian Chappell, the former Australia captain, cited the suspicion such a contrivance would create at a time when the game is resolute in its crusade against match-fixing.
Above all, it would have transformed even such a disrupted match into a laughable fiasco, a glorified equivalent of a Caribbean Sunday fete match, denigrating the image of Test cricket rather than enhancing it, as Smith believed it would.
West Indies have claimed the No. 1 spot in the ICC T20 rankings after Sri Lanka, who had largely occupied the top rung since they won the World T20 in 2014, were caned by New Zealand in Auckland on Sunday. West Indies have 118.36 rating points, and are now marginally ahead of both Sri Lanka and Australia who have exactly 118 rating points each.
ST AUGUSTINE, Trinidad (CMC) — Andre McCarthy struck his maiden regional one day hundred and leg-spinner Damien Jacobs claimed a five-wicket haul as Jamaica Scorpions rebounded from their opening-round loss to crush ICC Americas by 184 runs here yesterday.
Playing at the Frank Worrell Memorial Ground at the UWI Sport & Physical Education Centre, Scorpions piled up 260 for eight off their 50 overs with the 28-year-old McCarthy hammering 118 from 119 deliveries.
Red Force vs Pride
KJORN OTTLEY and Kyle Hope slammed attractive unbeaten half centuries to propel the Trinidad and Tobago Red Force to an emphatic nine-wicket victory over the Barbados Pride in their second match of the Nagico Super50 regional tournament.
Ottley made 80 not out and Hope, a Barbados importee playing against his countrymen, slammed an undefeated 70 as the defending champions Red Force, chasing Barbados’ paltry 161 all out in 49.3 overs, finished on 163 for the loss of the just one wicket in 35.5 overs.
Batting first, Guyana Jaguars posted 219-9 from the allotted 50 overs, before a solid all-round bowling performance saw the Hurricanes being blown away for 147.
That’s the message from former Australia captain Allan Border to current West Indies skipper Jason Holder after he oversaw one of the worst visits to this country by a touring side in recent memory.
Holder led the Windies to a 2-0 series loss that in all likelihood would have been 3-0 if not for nearly three days of the Sydney Test being washed out.
Even that result brought about criticism of Holder’s captaincy, after Australia captain Steve Smith claimed his offer of contriving to set up a result via multiple declarations was rebuffed by the Windies.
Despite escaping with a draw the men from the Caribbean are at a low ebb, ranked only above Bangladesh and Zimbabwe in Test cricket and facing a myriad of serious governance issues within West Indies cricket.
THE TRINIDAD and Tobago Cricket Board has described as “unfortunate” a post made on the Twitter social media account of cricketer Lendl Simmons regarding the Red Force squad on Thursday.
The tweet suggested that the present complement of national cricketers participating in the Nagico Super50 regional tournament, which got underway on Thursday, was “starving,” and which was apparently prompted by a slight delay in the provision of a US$50 stipend (per diem) to each player.
The TTCB has emphasised that the stipends are provided by the West Indies Cricket Board, and not the territorial boards, and that all players were informed of the difficulty in immediately accessing US currency in Portof- Spain because of the present economic situation.
However all members of the Red Force squad received their per diem on Thursday, the first day of the 17-day tournament and were in no way inconvenienced by the issue according to team management who kept the cricketers informed of the developments.
