The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : Easy win for New Zealand

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 04, 2004

Sport

Sport - Cricket

Easy win for New Zealand

By Ted Corbett

CARDIFF, JULY 3. Brian Lara, captain of the West Indies and high-class cricket thinker, read the pitch, the situation and the conditions perfectly at this windy city on the edge of British cricket today. Chris Cairns, the great all-rounder in the New Zealand team, read it better and sneaked an advantage that must ensure its place in the NatWest final next weekend.

Lara changed his batting order so that he opened with Chris Gayle, leaving Shivnarine Chanderpaul to play the anchor role at No.4.

For 18 overs, in which 83 runs were scored, Lara dictated the way the game was shaped, to the horror of the New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming, who had followed the pattern of this series and asked the West Indies to bat after winning the toss.

At that point, with the West Indies "set up pretty good" as he put it later, Cairns bowled a ball that skimmed across Lara's chest. A huge appeal for a catch at the wicket was turned down but the damage had been done and Cairns' next ball, 15 miles an hour slower, caught Lara in two minds and his half-hearted forward shot lobbed to Fleming at mid-on. Fleming, the most consistent catcher in the series — for all the brilliant effort by Paul Collingwood in the England win at Headingley — dived forward and held the ball cleanly.

The 7,000 Welsh crowd had been robbed of yet another fine spectacle: Lara on the rampage. He had already scored 58 at a run a ball, with 12 fours and the six that brought his fifty and shown a full range of his shots from the classical cover drive to the pull from outside off stump to the mid-wicket boundary.

England's Gus Fraser, who faced most of the greats in the 1990s from Sachin Tendulkar to Steve Waugh, told me recently that Lara was the best of them all. This small man with the high backlift, the steely wrists and the rapidly shuffling feet is not just technically precise but adds the flourish and the killer instinct of the true cricket great. Witness the pull shot with which he greeted young James Anderson at Headingley this week. It said: "Yes, son, I have heard of you. Now you realise who I am."

Once New Zealand had got rid of Lara — who passed 1,000 one-day runs against it in this innings — West Indies never flourished again, thanks to Cairns. Chris Gayle went to him for 27 and Ramnaresh Sarwan for 54 but the last seven batsmen were out for 36 runs and the whole side was unhinged for 216, a paltry total on a pitch worth nearer 280, even though it was the biggest and longest innings of the tournament.

At 180 for three in the 37th over West Indies should have gone on to make 250. Instead its inexperienced batsmen were overpowered by a side which may lack glamour but which is second to no one in its intensity, its knowledge and its application.

It remains a mystery that none of the three sides in this competition has been able to bat for the full 50 overs. England has never won batting first since Michael Vaughan became captain, New Zealand simply doesn't have the batting line-up for that tactic and the West Indies, full of talented young batsmen, has no-one apart from Lara, Gayle and Sarwan who can play a long innings.

The West Indians wanted a bright performance from their young fast bowlers if they were to win this game but Jermaine Lawson began with a nine-ball over which cost nine runs — bowling with a fierce wind gusting round him, hardly a Caribbean feature — and soon New Zealand was scoring freely with 33 off eight overs. England, training 50 miles away in Bristol where it plays New Zealand tomorrow, was best suited by a New Zealand victory although it will probably have to win both its remaining games to reach the final of this rain-hit event.

A Lord's final without England is unthinkable but it will lose even more glamour if Lara is absent.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Sport