West Indies faced a heart-breaking 35-run defeat against Zimbabwe in the 13th match of the ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifiers 2023 on Saturday (June 24). The team’s current head coach and former skipper Daren Sammy expressed deep dissatisfaction with the Caribbean side’s performance in the ongoing tournament and called out his team for poor fielding.
It is worth mentioning that West Indies dropped Zimbabwean all-rounder Sikandar Raza twice in the match on scores of 1 and 7. The missed opportunities turned out to be fatal mistakes by the Windies team, and it eventually cost them the game, with Raza emerging as the highest run-scorer in the match and scoring 68 runs off 58 balls. Raza’s catch wasn’t the only one that the Shai Hope-led side failed to hold onto; they shelled four catches overall during the Zimbabwe innings.
Speaking about the defeat at the post-match press conference, Sammy voiced his disappointment and emphasized that if they continue to give opportunities to the opposition batters, they will ultimately be dominated by them. He further stated that his players failed to put up a good performance and didn’t deserve to win.
“Extremely disappointed. At the toss, we got to do what we wanted to do, which is to bowl first. Look, if we continue to display this type of fielding – we’ve spoken about it for the last few games – and if you keep giving the opposition’s best batters chances, eventually the cricket gods will catch up with you,” said Sammy.
“And it did with us today, but (a target of) 269 on that surface… Again, these are the things we’re trying to change. We’ve seen it happen in the past before and the direction that I want this team to move forward…Today was really poor and it’s about taking responsibility and we didn’t do that today. And hence we didn’t deserve to win at all today,” he added.
While talking to the press, Sammy also addressed the qualification scenario of the West Indies team. Although the world cup winner said that the loss hadn’t been a setback to their journey, he at the same time confessed that it certainly would make the task a bit difficult for them.
“I wouldn’t say it hampers (our qualification) but it makes it more difficult. You’d love to go into the Super Six with four points. We knew from the time we left home that this game would’ve been very important to us. And again, like I said, the way we’ve played… I kept telling the guys that we kept on winning games (by) not playing our best cricket,” Sammy told the media personnel.
