It is en­trenched in his­to­ry that “crick­et is a fun­ny old game with many sur­pris­es and any­thing can hap­pen.” It did in the fi­nal of the 2023 Caribbean Pre­mier League T20 se­ries, where the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers per­formed quite poor­ly. The bats­men failed to demon­strate the ca­pac­i­ty to score runs, los­ing their wick­ets to a com­bi­na­tion of good bowl­ing and poor de­ci­sion-mak­ing.

The Guyana Ama­zon War­riors came good at last in a fi­nal and won hand­some­ly; noth­ing can di­min­ish in any way the great per­for­mance of the team.

They were led in the bowl­ing de­part­ment by Dwaine Pre­to­ri­ous with able sup­port from Gu­dakesh Motie and skip­per Im­ran Tahir; the TKR bat­ters had no worth­while re­sponse.

Led by skip­per Kieron Pol­lard, Nicholas Pooran and An­dre Rus­sell, TKR were re­duced to flash­ing and hop­ing. There could be seen, too, a mea­sure of ar­ro­gance in their bat­ting. The out­stand­ing dif­fer­ence was young Kea­cy Cartey, who showed stom­ach and in­tel­li­gence for the fight.

The War­riors bats­men, Shai Hope and the young Saim Ayub, bat­tered the op­po­si­tion bowlers, reach­ing the pal­try 94-run tar­get with­out ever look­ing like they would be sep­a­rat­ed.

The de­feat should be a hum­bling ex­pe­ri­ence for the TKR and their vaunt­ed bat­ters. Whether or not the coach, skip­per and their play­ers un­der­rat­ed the War­riors, the fact is they were com­plete­ly out­played by the op­po­si­tion.

It should al­so be a les­son for the TKR that play­ing against a home team with their sup­port­ers chant­i­ng and urg­ing their play­ers on, more so hun­gry for a vic­to­ry that had elud­ed the team on five pre­vi­ous oc­ca­sions, Pol­lard and his men should have been at their sharpest.

At no point in their ef­fort to put a de­cent score on the board did the TKR bat­ters show the ca­pac­i­ty to take stock when wick­ets were falling, to gath­er them­selves to put on part­ner­ships which could have seen the team to a chal­leng­ing score.

Not one bat­ter, top, mid­dle or low­er or­der, was able to stay with Cartey to at least play out the 20 overs. As an aside, it’s the kind of lack of back­bone that has so of­ten been demon­strat­ed by the West In­di­an team.

It was even more per­plex­ing giv­en the fact that TKR had bat­tled back from a poor show­ing last sea­son in which they failed to make the play­offs, to reach the fi­nal ahead of the oth­er con­tenders, show­ing, along the way, some of the grit and de­ter­mi­na­tion pre­vi­ous ti­tle-win­ning TKR teams had shown.

In the cir­cum­stances, how­ev­er, it is re­peat­ed with praise for the Ama­zon War­riors, led with in­spi­ra­tion by Tahir with full com­mit­ment by his team mem­bers. In this vein, we al­so com­mend Shai Hope as Play­er of the Se­ries for high scor­ing con­sis­ten­cy. He is show­ing that he can play for this West In­di­an team in all forms of the game.

All said and done, an 11th sea­son of the CPL has come and gone. What lessons will be learned from it on the part of the play­ers, or­gan­is­ers and crick­et­ing of­fi­cials are left to be seen.