West Indies’ 50-run win over Bangladesh in the 3rd T20I on Saturday to give the visitors a 2-1 series win, meant that the men in maroon ran out winners in a T20I series for the first time since 2017. With the feeling that Windies was able to field a near full-strength XI of their current T20I squad, all things considered (with the controversies), comes the realization that the “future” is nearer to being the “present” than it really is to being in the “future”. Where does this then leave the fans? We could continue the relentless lobby for the inclusion of ‘senior players’, or go, “ha! we don’t need them anymore”. Or, the third option—where we just revel in the fact that, either way, we will become similar to other fan bases; knowing that the nature of the pool of players is such that, regardless, we will have high quality players representing us and just have a bit of a debate amongst ourselves when our favourites are left out of squad selection; all in the hope that we will be winning in the meantime, of course. So, we can rest easy as it seems Windies stills has the blueprint to remain competitive, not based solely on this series win, in the shortest format of the game after all.
Following a 16-ball half-century in the first T20I against Bangladesh, which placed him 3rd in the history books in terms of fastest T20I fifties– many were left wondering if Shai Hope was a “one hit wonder”. However, he also had scores of 88 runs from 45 deliveries, 25 from 16, 43 from 35, 42 from 34 and 34 from 24 that put him on track to 8th place in the CPL18 top-scores list. Along with his performances in this series, if one is an incident, two is coincidence and three is a pattern–then what is eight? Ladies and gentlemen, it is safe to say that Shai Hope is not a fluke.
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