KOLKATA // Samuel Badree did not win the player-of-the-final award. Chances are you probably were not looking out for him when West Indies began their celebrations at the end of a quite wondrous Kolkata night.
Chances are that your skin is still tingling and that your mind is still scrambled by the dead-eyed, languid genius of Marlon Samuels.
At training on Saturday evening, long-time Samuels-observers, au fait with his moods and swings, noted his focus and thought there might be a special innings on Sunday.
Chances are that you might still be in the process of lifting your jaw off the floor in response to the way Carlos Brathwaite ended this. First six? Bad ball. Second six? OK, some shot. Third six? This is crazy. The fourth? Mayhem.
Read more:
Carlos Brathwaite leads West Indies past England to win World Twenty20 final thriller
Marlon Samuels’ place among West Indies cricket lore is secure after World T20 final performance
This was power-hitting distilled right down to its purest, 100 per cent equation.
Forget dot balls. Forget those singles that should have been doubles. Forget the mishits. Forget the dismissals of some of their batsmen in search of that hitting, the kind of dismissals that might lead to some questioning their intelligence.
Forget England's death bowling, so razor-sharp this tournament and which, until those four deliveries from Ben Stokes, still looked as if might win it for them. Remember only how Braithwaite finished it.
So the chances are that Badree slipped by in all this.
He did not do the “Champion” dance that has become the anthem of this tournament when the champions were being handed the trophy. If at any point he has, I have yet to see it. He did not take off his shirt like his teammates, to flex those muscles.
Instead he hung around on the edges of this celebration, taking pictures of the others holding the trophy with his phone. He had one teammate take a picture of him with it, except he held it so politely and gently it was as if he was embarrassed by it.
Darren Sammy, his captain, came up to him and asked him to take a picture of him holding both the men’s and women’s trophy (the West Indies women’s side had won their final against Australia earlier in the day).
Sammy looked at the picture and then asked him to take another. Perhaps it was not a good one. Perhaps he just wanted more.
Photo gallery: Carlos Brathwaite and Marlon Samuels star for West Indies in World Twenty20 final
Then, incongruously, Badree ambled off to do some media, an incongruity that should not mask that if he did not win this final outright for his side then he set it up for them beautifully.
It is an incongruity that has marked his entire career.
For one, to be a leg-spinner in the West Indies, even now so far removed from the days of their fast-bowling greatness, is to be secondary. To be one who does not turn the ball big and plays, basically, just the one format? Party wallflowers attract greater attention.
Then, to be a West Indian spinner in the time of Sunil Narine? Narine was in town briefly just ahead of the final, potentially for the Indian Premier League (IPL) to which he might return.
On Saturday, during training, somebody joked it might be a good idea to draft him into the side, or at least invite him to the training session to spook out England. Drop anyone for Sunil, they said.
Earlier in the tournament, in fact, after not winning a player of the match award against Sri Lanka despite taking three for 12, Badree was saying that he needed to step up and fill those “huge shoes”.
He has his own pair now and they are pretty big.
It is appropriate that his major work was done just over half an hour into the final, waiting to be overshadowed by everything that followed. Being bowled out by as early as the seventh over of England’s innings was Sammy’s plan for Badree to “boss the Powerplay”.
It will not, Sammy assured us at the end of a long, crazy night, be forgotten. “That’s why he is the No 1 bowler in the world in Twenty20 cricket.”
He is also, let us remind ourselves, a champion.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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