West Indies v Australia: first T20 international – live!

17th over: West Indies 117-5 (Russell 37, Allen 3) You cannot do that, Andre Russell! Starc comes back to do what he does, bowl unhittable fast yorkers at the death. The first attempt is outside off stump, not quite full enough, a low full toss. Generally very hard to hit, and anyone who does hit one sprays it out on the off side. Russell clubs it over long on for six. The power in that shot! To take a ball of Starc’s pace and send it right back the way it came, not with a straight bat but with a cross-bat drag? That’s praxis. Incredible strength. Starc lands the next on the pitch, wider still of off stump, and Russell is down on one knee getting a full cross-bat swing to send it back over the bowler’s head for six more.

Loses strike, then gets it back for the final ball of the over, and Starc resorts to a slower ball that slips out, a high slow full toss. Somehow that’s the one that Russell misses, just edging on the bounce through to the keeper.

16th over: West Indies 101-5 (Russell 24) The wides work! Mitch Marsh snares a wicket with the eighth ball of his over. Russell has pulled one ball for four, other than which it’s been tidy. Marsh is trying to angle across Hetmyer to finish the over, and keeps bowling too wide outside off stump. Goes once. Goes again. Third time lucky, Hetmyer drives, and the sliced outside edge is taking at short third.

15th over: West Indies 92-4 (Hetmyer 19, Russell 19) Agar to bowl his third. Has a big appeal against Russell as the batsman misses a sweep, but the umpire rules the ball was going down. Russell celebrates by hitting Agar out of the ground! Huuuuuge hit. They’ve lost the ball. It’s literally gone over the stands at deep midwicket. It was on off stump, he dipped his front leg and sent it into space. A version of the slog sweep. When the ball finally returns from the street, Andre Russell does it again. Far wider of off stump, he has to reach for it and drag it to the leg side, hits it flatter and shorter, but the same result. Because it bounces near the entrance gates and then rushes through the turnstiles, outside. Doesn’t stop to get a pass-out. The over nets 16 runs, the first properly big one tonight for West Indies.

14th over: West Indies 76-4 (Hetmyer 17, Russell 6) Nobody can get hold of anything tonight. Hetmyer throws the bat at Marsh and only gets one run down the ground. Russell backs away and slams a cut shot, but it gets stopped at cover. No run. Then he’s similarly saved at midwicket – it’s notionally a dropped catch by Henriques, but the pull shot is travelling and he saves three runs by getting in its way. Hetmyer drives through cover. Three singles from Mitch Marsh in the 14th over! That’s when you know that a bowling side is on top.

13th over: West Indies 73-4 (Hetmyer 15, Russell 5) There goes Russell, batting bareheaded, a clean swing through the line at Zampa and bashes it back over the bowler’s head for four. Again, only one boundary from the over, seven runs in total. They’ve got 42 balls left.

12th over: West Indies 66-4 (Hetmyer 13, Russell 0) A boundary for Hetmyer off his pads behind square before the run out, and they finish with 7 from the over as Andre Russell arrives at the crease. It’ll take one of his special innings to get West Indies to any sort of total.

That is a bizarre run out. Starc returns, and gets a wicket by sowing confusing. A fast swinging yorker hits Hetmyer on the ankle, the Australians are all appealing, and in the confusion Pooran is thinking about stealing a single for the leg bye. Hetmyer isn’t thinking about it at all, he’s thinking about the umpire’s imminent decision, then starts to stutter down the pitch as well. Josh Philippe is wise to it, and he swoops in from midwicket to snare the ball and underarm at the non-striker’s stumps. Pooran has not quite got back.

Pooran then is stopped at the boundary line as the umpire remembers that by the protocol, he should check whether a wicket had in fact fallen lbw before the run out took place. He rolls through the DRS process and finds the ball was going down leg.

11th over: West Indies 59-3 (Hetmyer 7, Pooran 17) The go-slow continues. Pooran tries to take on Zampa but can’t read him: ends up stuck in the pose after a huge cover drive that makes no contact with a googly, then gets beaten on the outside edge by a ball that slides across him. Zampa gives a gift with a full toss outside leg that Pooran keep sweep for four, but his only other score is a leading-edge single when Pooran tries to pull, after which Hetmyer flicks a single.

10th over: West Indies 53-3 (Hetmyer 6, Pooran 12) Nearing the halfway mark of the innings and not even 50 on the board, this is a crazy scoreline for a big-hitting team. Pooran decides to go. Rocks back to pull Marsh to deep midwicket and there’s nearly a catch. Agar rightly decides to go for it, coming in off the rope. Doesn’t quite reach it, and the half volley beats him for four. But you can afford that risk. Then Pooran carves in the air through backward point, another near catch that ends up at the boundary. They’re at least past the 50 now.

9th over: West Indies 42-3 (Hetmyer 5, Pooran 2) Dan Christian gets the ball. Welcome back.

I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with Pollard: he tweaked his hamstring taking a quick run while batting during the last South Africa game a few days ago.

Christian hits the de rigeur length immediately to the two left-handers, back of a length on the hip so it’s hard to swing through the ball. And they can’t! Four singles from the over, two of them leg byes, so Christian’s figures read 0 for 2.

8th over: West Indies 38-3 (Hetmyer 4, Pooran 1) The next generation together for West Indies then: Pooran joins Hetmyer. They have a lot of work to do. Four runs and a wicket from the Marsh over.

A bowling change brings the wicket of the set player. Marsh bowls pretty regulation seam-up most of the team. Back of a length, as per Hazlewood. This ball isn’t a cutter, it’s bolt upright, but still moves away from the bat a touch. Simmons is just hanging that bat out there, trying to run the ball away for a single, but gets it finer than that into the keeper’s gloves.

7th over: West Indies 34-2 (Simmons 27, Hetmyer 2) Adam Zampa comes on, the leg-spinner. Causes a few problems as well, with a miscue from Simmons before a loud lbw appeal against Hetmyer. Bit of a bat on that one. Simmons knows they need to pick up the pace, and goes for it to end the over with a full ball landing on the line of leg stump. He digs out the lofted hit, not getting all of it, but just enough to clear the rope at long on.

6th over: West Indies 24-2 (Simmons 19, Hetmyer 0) Three overs, two wickets, three runs for Hazlewood. Outstanding. And one of those runs was the wide. I’ll say this clearly: there is a consistent misunderstanding of the Laws by umpires. This happens across cricket. The wide law bases the ruling on the original position of the batter, not on whether the ball passes leg stump. Gayle in that case moved his back leg across, and then the ball passed behind that leg. Had he stayed put, it would have hit his leg outside the line of the leg stump. That is not a wide. It’s a mistake that we see made again and again, in matches around the world. Not a normal mistake, but a failure to have the Laws properly interpreted in training or corrected after matches. This really shouldn’t be hard to fix, but it isn’t being done.

If a player started off with a guard that was inside the line of leg stump, then anything past leg stump would be a wide. But that almost never happens. They start with the back of their leg outside the line of leg stump, and that is the wide line.

The contrast in styles is fascinating. Starc, seen as a white-ball weapon, one over and then off. Hazlewood, seen as a Test player, into his third over off the top of the innings. And why not? They can’t score a run from him. He keeps bowling back of a length, and Simmons swings, angles, moves around his crease, and still can’t get bat on ball. The bounce keeps foxing him, and good pace. It takes him four balls to find a single. Gayle gets a wide, then tries to play a pull shot. He starts with low hands, trying to pull from around waist height, and he too is done in by the bounce.

5th over: West Indies 22-0 (Simmons 18, Gayle 4) There he goes! Simmons hits the first six of the night, stepping away from his stumps and dragging Agar over midwicket. Agar was going at the stumps as he generally does, and Simmons counters that. He mistimes a single away from an attempted leg-side shot, leaving Gayle the chance to get off strike with a booming square drive to a wider ball, Agar losing his line now that a left-hander has replaced a right.

4th over: West Indies 11-0 (Simmons 11, Gayle 0) The slow start continues! Josh Hazlewood bowls a scoreless over, truly rare in T20 cricket. Chris Gayle often starts slow, and he’s facing high quality stuff. Hazlewood hits a perfect length, the kind that Gayle can’t get forward but which still isn’t short, a slight angle across the left-hander, moving away from him consistently. Gayle decides to see it off.

3rd over: West Indies 11-0 (Simmons 11, Gayle 0) Only the one over for Starc first up, as Ashton Agar gets an early look at this surface. And starts beautifully! One scoring shot from the over, for two runs, for a left-arm spinner in the Powerplay. Agar mostly bowls in at the stumps, with one or two wider and moving away, at a difficult length. Simmons faces out the lot, finding the field a couple of times, and getting a leading edge that he’s lucky to see fall safely on the off side. He’s 11 off 16, not an opener’s flying start.

2nd over: West Indies 9-0 (Simmons 9, Gayle 0) The familiar hulking form of Chris Gayle walks to the middle, in his now-customary spot at first drop where he’s done well in recent editions of the IPL. He’s at the non-striker’s end given the previous pair crossed before the catch was taken. The only score from the over is a hopping glance by Simmons for a single. Good start, Josh H.

That was easy. Josh Hazlewood bangs his first two balls in short. The left-handed Lewis loves to hit a six, and goes for the second delivery with a pull shot. Cloughs it, toe and top edge so that it hangs in the air, and Mitchell Marsh moves around well from mid-on to take a running catch on the edge of the circle towards midwicket.

1st over: West Indies 8-0 (Simmons 8, Lewis 0) Starc commences, the left-armer swinging the ball into the pads as is customary when he bowled against right-handers. Lendl Simmons gets lucky when he nicks a ball that swings in a touch, he’s anticipating more and misreads the line, and he’s rewarded with four runs, then he gets a square drive out of the middle of the bat for four more.

Both teams takes the knee before the first ball is bowled. This is… I’ll choose the adjective interesting, given that Australia declined to make this gesture last year in England or during their own home summer. From memory there were some players who wanted to and other voices that argued against it, and overall the team wanted a consistent approach. They took some criticism for it from Michael Holding among others. But now that Australia is playing in a majority-Black country, and with an Indigenous player in their own ranks, the knee is taken by all on the field.

This looks like… Allen Chastanet. The Prime Minister of St Lucia has dropped by, casually dressed in a polo shirt and face mask, to meet the teams before the anthems. He goes with elbow bumps instead of handshakes, and exchanges pleasantries with Australia’s team manager Gavin Dovey and coach Justin Langer either side of being introduced to each player in the squad by Finch.

The St Lucia anthem plays, then Australia’s anthem, then Rally Round the West Indies. We’re all anthemed out.

Samuel Badree – previously recognised by current player DJ Bravo as a Champion – has jumped the fence into the media enclosure. Not literally, that would be a bio-breach. But he’s on camera presenting the pitch report rather than playing. Curtly Ambrose makes grave pronouncements about whether some cracks in the pitch will open up. (Doubt it. It’s nighttime in St Lucia and we’ve got 40 overs to play.) The surface looks super hard, almost shiny, like clean Teflon.

DAN CHRISTIAN IS BACK!

Yes, that’s worth Caps Lock. One of the most respected and affectionately regarded players within Australian cricket, who has increasingly become a leader and spokesman for Indigenous players, while also becoming one of the most successful and effective T20 players winning every league there is to win around the world. He played a handful of games for Australia in ODI and T20 cricket, and that inclusion ended in 2014 aside from a one-off T20 match in 2017.

But now he’s back, baby. He’s become a pure late-innings finisher, which is exactly the job the national team needs filled. And he can do some handy seam bowling too.

As for West Indies, an unexpected change. Kieron Pollard has been captaining this side, and did all the pre-series promotional business. But he’s not playing today with a vague injury concern, and Nicholas Pooran is captaining his national side for the first time in any format.

West Indies
Lendl Simmons
Evin Lewis
Chris Gayle
Shimron Hetmyer
Nicholas Pooran * +
Andre Russell
Dwayne Bravo
Fabian Allen
Hayden Walsh
Obed McCoy
Fidel Edwards

Australia
Aaron Finch *
Matthew Wade +
Mitchell Marsh
Josh Philippe
Moises Henriques
Ben McDermott
Daniel Christian
Ashton Agar
Mitchell Starc
Adam Zampa
Josh Hazlewood

T20 cricket 101, certainly to start a series: choose to chase. That means you get to look at an unfamiliar surface while the other team has to bat on it, and you know exactly what your task is once it’s your turn. Aaron Finch gets that early advantage.