Well, that was all a bit strange

Unaccountable things about West Indies’ win: man in old-style India blue kit dancing along at the back
© Getty Images



The 2012 World Twenty20 final will go down in the annals of cricket as one of the oddest matches in the game’s history. Glorious, but odd. A magnificent triumph for a West Indies team that had comfortably avoided magnificent triumphs for most of the last decade and a half. But still odd. Few textbooks on How To Win T20 Matches would suggest not scoring a run off the bat in the first 16 balls of the match, or advocate the tactical merits of being 14 for 2 at the end of the six-over Powerplay, or sagely stroke their chin before strongly advising hitting only one boundary in the first 11 overs whilst limiting your score to 38 for 2.

Fortunately for West Indies, they had access to the only copy of that book, and followed its masterful strategy to perfection. Even after Marlon Samuels’ startlingly brilliant outbreak, during which he hit Lasith Malinga – a bowler rated by no less a source than the renowned cricket website and source of all truth and knowledge, ESPNcricinfo, as the most effective bowler over the history of the IPL ‒ for five sixes and a four in eight balls, they still posted a score of just 137.

The West Indian bowlers had been the least economical of any of the Super Eight teams until the semi-final stage (conceding almost eight runs per over), and they had never beaten Sri Lanka in a T20 international. In all T20Is between the top eight international teams, teams defending a first-innings score of between 130 and 149 had won just 12 of 41 matches, and on the ten occasions on which they had tried to defend a score of under 150 in a T20I, they had won only two, tied two, and lost six, the most recent of those defeats being when the same Sri Lanka side they now faced chased down 130 with nine wickets and almost five overs to spare just eight days earlier. And by chased down, I mean chased down in the manner that a police motorcyclist chases down an escaped tortoise on a pensioner’s mobility scooter.

It was, therefore, a surprise that West Indies won. And an eyebrow-singeing surprise that they ultimately won at a canter. Having taken 19 wickets in their first five matches, in both the semi-final and final they bowled out their opposition in under 20 overs. If the success of Sunil Narine was not unexpected, the other lynchpins of the Caribbean constriction of the Sri Lankan batsmen had been keeping their economical run-saving powder drier than the Atacama Desert through the rest of the tournament.

Captain Darren Sammy, who had taken 2 for 125 in his 15 overs in the tournament, took 2 for 6 in two overs in the heart of Sri Lanka’s innings in the final. Samuels had bowled eight overs in the first six games of the tournament – and taken a less than frugal 2 for 93 (2 for 110 from nine, if you include his almost-tournament-ending Super Over against New Zealand). In the final, he took 1 for 15 from 4. And conceded zero boundaries – those other nine overs had been spanked for ten fours and five sixes.

This was a match that left the cricketing world’s flabber well and truly gasted. The most devastating T20 batsman in the world scored 3 off 16 balls. The format’s most devastating fast bowler took 0 for 54 in 4 overs. It all ended with Caribbean cricketers doing a South Korean dance. (Until Sunday’s final, the only appearance of “gangnam” on a cricket ground had been the noise Mike Gatting used to make when chomping into a particularly appetising chicken sandwich.)

One of T20’s weaknesses as a format is that there can be a lack of narrative variety from one match to the next. This final had an unexpected destination, and arrived there via a completely baffling route, as if someone had spilt scalding hot chocolate over its cricketing GPS and said: “Right, fire her up and let’s see where this takes us.”

It was a grand climax to a tournament, which, after a week of phoney-war group matches, provided a ten-day frenzy of drama. A World Twenty20 has that rarest of all sporting commodities – rarity. It happens for two and a half weeks every two years, and is the only international T20 that anyone (a) takes any notice of, or (b) genuinely cares about, and is the only T20 cricket where the teams have any meaningful identity. Even if you are not especially enamoured of the T20 format itself, these factors, plus the unpredictability of the results T20 generates in any given match, allied to the format of the tournament, combine to create a heady cocktail that has rapidly become one of the highlights of the world cricket schedule.

● Why did West Indies triumph? Because ‒ and only because ‒ they followed the blueprint for World Twenty20 success, outlined in my podcast at the start of the tournament. They started badly. Perfectly badly. This historically flawless campaign strategy was established by India in 2007, and successfully mimicked by Pakistan two years later and by England in 2010.

This time, Sammy’s men won only one of their first five matches – in their two rain-shortened group matches, they lost to Australia, and had to settle for a no-result against Ireland, then, in the Super Eight phase, beat England, were obliterated by Sri Lanka, and tied with New Zealand. It was a textbook, beautifully orchestrated campaign, involving doing as little as possible to reach the knockout stages, to the extent that they only squeaked into the semi-finals courtesy of Tim Southee’s “Oh Whoops” Super Over.