LAHORE, 11 December 2006 — Uninspired batting and sloppy fielding by the West Indies, helped Pakistan win the third One-Day International by seven wickets here yesterday, and take an unbeatable 2-0 lead in the five-match ODI series against the visitors.
Pakistan won the second ODI on Thursday by two wickets while the first match was abandoned due to rains without a ball being bowled in Rawalpindi on Dec. 5.
Chasing a revised target of 191 runs from 35 overs — under the Duckworth/Lewis method — Pakistan won with eight balls to spare. They lost three wickets in the process. Left-handed opener Imran Farhat topscored for Pakistan with 58 — his sixth ODI fifty — off 72 balls which included six fours and two sixes.
Earlier, put into bat West Indies made 207 for 7 from 46.3 runs before bad light forced play to be disrupted for some 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the innings.
West Indies batting under heavily overcast, murky conditions were offered light by the umpires in the 40th over when the West Indies’ total was 167 for 5 but the batsmen decided to stay on. But fading light made play impossible with the 47th over in progress.
Due to some glitch in the floodlight system the light towers could not be switched on in time. In fact it took almost 80 more minutes to remove the fault. As it was a day and night match and keeping in view the heavy dew that fall late in the evenings, playing conditions were revised according to which Pakistan were given a new target of 191 runs from a minimum of 35 overs. And the West Indies have mostly themselves to blame for their undoing. Only Lendl Simmons, playing in only his second One-Dayer, batted sensibly to give his team a good platform for others to make a total worth chasing for Pakistan.
In the first place skipper Brian Lara’s decision to open the innings with Chris Gayle was not a prudent one. With his team playing without experienced batsmen Ramnaresh Sarwan who is now ruled out of the series and Shivnaraine Chanderpaul, who is still unfit after a knee injury, Lara should have kept himself for the No. 3 or 4 position to hold the innings together. His departure in the second over, leg before to seamer Rana Naved for naught was a severe blow. But Gayle and Simmons, batting in different styles, held the innings together. Gayle made a quickfire 41 from 37 balls while Simmons consolidated the innings. Once these two had departed there was not much left to be done.And after a poor show with the bat their performance in the field was equally worse. A certain run out chance was missed by Daren Ganga early in the innings to give Farhat a lease of life and then the other opener Mohammad Hafeez was dropped by Simmons when Pakistan’s total was 26. Kamran Akmal, who scored 23 off 20 balls, was then dropped by Lara in the slips. Another disappointing factor was the number of extras — 31 runs including 17 wides — the West Indies conceded when Pakistan batted. Clearly a very poor and undisciplined show in the field that cost them this match and may probably propel Pakistan to win the ODI series also. The fourth ODI of the series will be played in Multan on Dec 13.
