Marlon Samuels played a memorable innings as the West Indies hoisted the World Twenty20 trophy for the first time after hosts Sri Lanka choked in the final on Sunday.
With his team reeling at 14 for two after Chris Gayle failed to produce his usual fireworks, Samuels blasted a 56-ball 78 to power the West Indies to a decent 137 for six.
His combativeness seemed to have rubbed off on his bowling colleagues who shot out Sri Lanka for 101 in 18.4 overs for a 36-run victory.
Photo: AFP
The West Indies’ first World Cup trophy since winning the 50-over championship in 1979 triggered a wild “Gangnam Style” dance with Gayle doing a perfect imitation of the horse-riding dance made famous by South Korean singer Psy.
It was also their first major title since their 2004 Champions Trophy triumph.
In contrast, hosts Sri Lanka slumped to their fourth successive defeat in World Cup finals, and to make it worse, in front of a full house at the R. Premadasa Stadium.
“In the last two years, we have shown the never-say-die attitude, but we have not been getting the results in our favor,” West Indies captain Darren Sammy said at the victory presentation.
“This moment we’re going to live forever. The team has been through a lot not only in the last two years but the last decade,” he said.
“The mission was to win the Twenty20 World Cup. The belief we left the Caribbean with pulled us through,” Sammy said.
The West Indies skipper was left to rue his decision to bat first as the Sri Lanka bowlers straitjacketed a West Indies batting lineup teeming with some of the biggest hitters in the game.
Gayle, the biggest of them all, scratched around for a 16-ball 3 before Ajantha Mendis (4-12) trapped him leg before and the accurate Sri Lankan bowlers conceded a single boundary in the first 11 overs.
However, Samuels had other ideas as the 31-year-old took the Sri Lankan bowlers head on, hitting six sixes and three boundaries to inject some momentum into the moribund West Indies innings.
He singled out arguably the world’s best Twenty20 bowler, Lasith Malinga, and hit him for five sixes, including three in an over.
“Marlon batted very well, it was outstanding batting in a pressure situation,” Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene, who played in each of the team’s two World Cup 50 overs finals losses in 2007 and last year and the T20 final loss to Pakistan in 2009, said.
“He played some really good shots. It was one of those days when the momentum shifted and it was pretty tough to get back in it again,” he said.
Mendis went on to dismiss the big-hitting Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo and Andre Russell to negate the firepower in the West Indies batting order.
Bravo was unlucky to be given out leg before wicket after Simon Taufel, standing in his final game as an umpire, failed to notice an edge.
Down the order, Sammy (26) also chipped in with an unbeaten 15-ball cameo to give some respectability to the West Indies total.
Sri Lanka lost Tillakaratne Dilshan in the second over but Jayawardene (33) and former captain Kumar Sangakkara (22) were making steady progress before their batting order caved in, partially because of their anxiousness to stay ahead of the par score in case of a rain interruption which seemed imminent.
“The drops were falling, so we were not sure exactly how to go about it,” Jayawardene said.
“We knew we had to play to win the game and not through Duckworth-Lewis, but still we were 10-15 runs behind,” he said.
Sangakkara’s pull shot found Pollard in the deep, Angelo Mathews was bowled by Sammy trying to play a scoop shot and then Jayawardene fluffed his reverse pull to trigger a batting collapse aided by two run-outs down the order.
Samuels was adjudged Man of the Match, while Australia’s Shane Watson, highest scorer in the tournament and the second highest wicket-taker, was named the Player of the Tournament.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier