How Windies crash and burned..
Six or bust is not always the best formula
From 2012 to 2016, West Indies won two World Cups, with a semi-final exit sandwiched in between. While they were a strong bowling side throughout, their defining quality was a revolutionary batting approach.Conventional cricketing wisdom highlighted the need to minimise the number of dot balls a team chewed up. West Indies recognised that the runs their power-hitters could score by focusing on hitting sixes far outweighed the marginal gains from running singles. "People say we don't rotate our strike well," Daren Sammy, their captain at the time, said before the 2016 final. "But first thing is, you have to stop us from hitting boundaries."
After their early exit in 2021, the narrative was that West Indies' six-or-dot approach had been found out. "They're playing a dated brand of T20 cricket," Daren Ganga, who captained a Trinidad and Tobago side featuring Pollard, Lendl Simmons and Dwayne Bravo to the Stanford 20/20 title in 2008, said after West Indies' defeat to Sri Lanka.
"We had personnel that could do that [power-hitting] in 2016," Samuel Badree, West Indies' most economical bowler in the 2012 and 2016 campaigns, says. "Opposition teams weren't quite ready for that and they didn't plan for that back then. We caught a lot of teams by surprise. That worked in our favour, in addition to the smaller grounds and the conditions that were on offer."When you fast-forward five years, teams were better prepared. We've seen other teams [England and Australia, for example] who have copied that style but they've added the elements of strike rotation and lower dot-ball percentage, while we were stuck in that same old mould from 2016. We are quite inflexible and have one style: hit or miss. That might win you one or two games, but you're not going to win tournaments like that anymore."A batting line-up that looked ferocious on paper was feeble in practice. As Pollard made clear after last week's ODI series defeat to Ireland: "We have a batting problem in the Caribbean at the moment."
From 2012 to 2016, West Indies won two World Cups, with a semi-final exit sandwiched in between. While they were a strong bowling side throughout, their defining quality was a revolutionary batting approach.Conventional cricketing wisdom highlighted the need to minimise the number of dot balls a team chewed up. West Indies recognised that the runs their power-hitters could score by focusing on hitting sixes far outweighed the marginal gains from running singles. "People say we don't rotate our strike well," Daren Sammy, their captain at the time, said before the 2016 final. "But first thing is, you have to stop us from hitting boundaries."
After their early exit in 2021, the narrative was that West Indies' six-or-dot approach had been found out. "They're playing a dated brand of T20 cricket," Daren Ganga, who captained a Trinidad and Tobago side featuring Pollard, Lendl Simmons and Dwayne Bravo to the Stanford 20/20 title in 2008, said after West Indies' defeat to Sri Lanka.
"We had personnel that could do that [power-hitting] in 2016," Samuel Badree, West Indies' most economical bowler in the 2012 and 2016 campaigns, says. "Opposition teams weren't quite ready for that and they didn't plan for that back then. We caught a lot of teams by surprise. That worked in our favour, in addition to the smaller grounds and the conditions that were on offer."When you fast-forward five years, teams were better prepared. We've seen other teams [England and Australia, for example] who have copied that style but they've added the elements of strike rotation and lower dot-ball percentage, while we were stuck in that same old mould from 2016. We are quite inflexible and have one style: hit or miss. That might win you one or two games, but you're not going to win tournaments like that anymore."A batting line-up that looked ferocious on paper was feeble in practice. As Pollard made clear after last week's ODI series defeat to Ireland: "We have a batting problem in the Caribbean at the moment."
Link Text
