Where Barbados went wrong

GUYANA finished bottom-of-the-table in the regional first-class competition for the last two seasons.A few nights ago, however, they were celebrating their capture of the Caribbean Twenty20 title.It just underlines that in this extra shorter form of the game, anything is possible.Matches are not won on names and reputation. They are won on the ability to execute and the ability to absorb pressure.Any game can be lost in the twinkling of an eye. Any game can be lost on one mistake. Any game can take a dramatic transformation with one or two good or bad overs.All of the above explains why Barbados dramatically lost a final they should have won against Guyana at the Queen’s Park Oval on Saturday night.TurnaroundsThroughout the competition, we saw a few dramatic turnarounds, but none was as most sensational as this. Hardly anyone in their wildest dreams would have expected Guyana to get 50 runs from the last 3.3 overs with only two wickets in hand.Credit must be given to 19-year-old Jonathan Foo for his amazing unbeaten 42 off 17 balls. Having said that, there will be plenty of “ifs” and “buts” in trying to determine why the match was lost.In the end, most will point to a missed chance by Larry Babb that would have won the match for Barbados in the penultimate over, but we must look beyond that.One has to question why Barbados chose to bat first on winning the toss after successfully chasing the night before in the semi-finals against Jamaica.Additionally, with the rain around, you figured they might have wanted to bat second bearing in mind that previous Duckworth/Lewis targets seemed to favour the team chasing in this form of the game.Be that as it may, a total of 134 for five was way short of the 160 we consider to be par in Twenty20. It had a lot to do with the fact that Jonathan Carter took up as many as 62 balls for an unbeaten 57. Carter faced more than half the balls and made less than half the runs. In this version of the game, when you bat that long you really should score a run-and-a-half a ball.No team in this competition was able to defend a total of less than 140, but to their credit, Barbados did a wonderful job until the closing stages.It was a similar story in previous matches. The night before, against Jamaica, they conceded 76 runs in the last five overs. In the first match against Combined Campuses and Colleges (CCC) when they were defending 180, they conceded 59 from the last five overs to allow the opponents to level the scores.It is a trend that requires an analysis, and one of the contributing factors surely has to do with the choice of bowlers at the end.At crunch time, your best bowlers must have a role to play, and it is significant to note that captain Ryan Hinds, Barbados’ most economical bowler in the tournament – the only one to bowl at less than six runs an over – did not bowl a single ball in the last five overs in the matches against CCC, Jamaica, and Guyana.All of that is history and Barbados can only now rue the reality of missing out on US$25 000 and a ticket to South Africa for next month’s lucrative Airtel Champions League that had the potential to provide for future opportunities.• [email protected]