End of a formality

Well on the first day's play between the West Indies and South Africa, it was as though the West Indies though will not win the game, will atleast put up a tight finish by giving the visitors a run for their money. But, as expected, the West Indies just continued from where they had left in their last test against Australia. The world was saved from watching horrible cricket by the West Indies for as long as six months when the West Indie didn't have any major test series inbetween. Anyways, with that being a different issue, the 1^st test saw the Proteas taking a 1-0 lead in the 3 match test series needless to be said.

The match traveled from bad to worse as far as the West Indies were concerned. On the first day, when the Proteas were bowled out for a mere 352 on the board, it was as though the match would see the West Indies achieve an unexpected triumph which obviously didn't happen. And then after the second day's play when the West Indies team lost all their ten wickets for just 102 on the board, their defeat was confirmed. However, though the defeat was in hand for the West Indies, not many would have thought that to be on the fourth day itself.

Had the match been continued until the fifth day, there would have been much relief for both the West Indian players and fans as well. Precisely speaking, the match ended in less than four days when the first day which was truncated is given a close look at. The first day's play contained just 34 overs which saw the Proteas losing three important wickets. Had the West Indies taken on the game, may be they would have returned home with a little bit of satisfaction. However, now also they should be satisfied when nothing unexpected happened to Chris Gayle's team.

The worse happened to the West Indies when they lost the game in a span of just more than three days. The result would have been much more worse for the West Indies in case the South African captain Graeme Smith would have imposed a follow on which he fortunately didn't. In case that had happened, the result would have been achieved in may be two and a half days. If the scorecard is given a closer look at, the West Indies put up 395 runs on the board with both their innings put together. This was just 43 runs more than the 352 runs put up by South Africa in their first innings.

So, an innings defeat would have been avoided at any cost by WI.