A better?performance in the field! That is what stand-in captain of the Barbados team, Shamarh Brooks, is asking of his teammates as they head into tomorrow’s crucial sixth-round Regional Four-Day cricket match against the Leeward Islands at Kensington Oval.
After watching Barbados embarrassingly capitulate to be all out for 58 against Guyana in their second innings, the captain still feels that the seven dropped catches in Guyana’s mammoth first innings total of 441, were just as responsible as the batting collapse for their eventual demise.
Man Of The Match Narsingh Deonarine, who went on to score 84 in Guyana’s innings, was dropped on two, 26, 44 and 46, and also survived an easy run-out opportunity when Pedro Collins failed to gather the ball with the batsman stranded more than halfway down the pitch.
West Indies batsmen Ramnaresh Sarwan, who scored 58, was put down when he was only 15, and Shivnarine Chanderpaul was given a lifeline when he was seven, before eventually going on to score an unbeaten 125, which paved the way for Guyana’s 124-run first innings lead.
“We were in the game for the first day and a half, and then from there everything just went downhill.”
“The dropped chances really hurt us, and if we had taken those chances, it would have been a very different story,” the obviously disappointed Brooks told the media, shortly after crashing to defeat on Monday.
“A lot of those chances which we put down are catches that we would usually take. When you play against players like Deonarine, Sarwan and Chanderpaul, you can’t afford to drop them, because they are top class batsmen.”
Despite the humiliating loss, Brooks was of the view that it made no sense to dwell on Barbados’ lacklustre performance with both bat and ball, saying that they needed to pick themselves up.
“At the end of the day we can’t afford to sit down and feel sorry for ourselves. We lost that last match in the final two-and-a-half days and we have to really move on from that.
“We have two games remaining against the Windwards and the Leewards, and our job right now is to come out and win those games and qualify for the semi-final stage, and hopefully go on to win the competition.”
