The expected happens

Well if one could go through yesterday's post where I had written about the high possibility of the West Indies' batting collapsing owing to depth in the South African bowling that involves Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel, that was what exactly happened when the entire West Indian batting was shattered by the same two for a score just above hundred. One has to notice the coincidence when the South African batsmen fell for the West Indies for a score of just two runs above 350 and the very next day the West Indies team fell for the Proteas' bowling for just two runs more than 100.

Anyways, such coincidences appear in large in the game of cricket and this is nothing special whatsoever. However, coming back to the third day's lay between West Indies and South Africa, it is fascinating to see the home team crashing towards the touring country and that too by a margin of more than 200 runs. The margin happened to be a mammoth 240 runs with the West Indies being able to put up just 102 runs on the board despite having the like of Chris Gayle, Shivnarine Chanderapaul and Dwayne Bravo. The Proteas would have enforced a follow on had there been a little bit of courage from the South African captain.

May be the fact that they were the touring nation made the South African captain - Graeme Smith to decide against enforcing follow on the West Indies. The entire West Indies innings saw just three batsmen crossing double digit mark with Chandrapaul, Deonarine and Ramdin scoring 26, 29 and 25 respectively. The trio contributed a total of 80 runs out of the 102 put up on the board by the entire team. Including the extras bowled by the South African bowlers, the contribution from the rest of the West Indian batsmen come up to be 88. Meaning the trio put up 80% of the total score.

This should have been anticipated before hand itself when a bowler - less West Indian squad could contain the entire South African squad in a single day when they saw the Proteas end their first innings scoring just 352 on board. Then, one can imagine the case when a full fledged South African team with bowlers of the ranks of Dale Steyn and Morkel would bowl and that too on a pitch that would have got a bit slower compared to what it was a day ago. Not only did the West Inidies innings end at 102 but, they could not play for more than 47 overs meaning, the innings lasted just 2 sessions. Anyways, that was far more than expected.