West Indies Beat Sri Lanka by Seven Wickets in First T20I

Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica set the stage for the first T20I between West Indies and Sri Lanka on Thursday night, and the home side made sure the crowd went home happy by chasing down whatever Sri Lanka put up without breaking too much of a sweat, with captain Shai Hope holding the innings together from start to finish on a pitch that was not making life easy for anyone holding a bat.

Sri Lanka batted first and the West Indies bowlers did their job well enough to keep the visitors to a total that was always going to be within reach, with Jason Holder leading the effort from the front and earning the Player of the Match award for what he produced with the ball throughout the innings.

The chase started like a freight train as 66 runs in six overs without losing a wicket, two openers in complete control, the boundary fielders getting a lot of exercise and the Kingston crowd making noise from the very first over, and at that point of the match looked like it was already heading in one direction before the powerplay had even finished.

Hasaranga came on and changed things temporarily, dismissing Brandon King with a well-disguised wrong'un and then having Shimron Hetmyer caught in the deep for 17 off 10 balls, and Roston Chase crawled through a difficult 16-ball knock from 26 deliveries that drained some of the momentum the opening stand had built, but every time West Indies threatened to make things complicated for themselves, Shai Hope was standing at the other end looking completely unbothered by whatever was happening around him.

Hope finished unbeaten on 65, Rovman Powell launched a six over the ropes in the final over to end the discussion, and West Indies crossed the line with four balls still remaining to go 1-0 up in the series with the second match coming up on June 14 at the same ground.

Sportscape feels that the middle-order wobble that happened between overs seven and fifteen is actually the most useful thing to come out of this game for West Indies, because it showed Darren Sammy's side that they cannot always rely on the powerplay doing all the heavy lifting, and going into the rest of the series having already identified that the batting needs more stability through the middle phases is the kind of information that tends to get addressed before it becomes a problem in a bigger game.