Mys­tery spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine was the man to shine for the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers yes­ter­day as they de­feat­ed the St Kitts/Nevis Pa­tri­ots by six wick­ets to move in­to the semi­fi­nals of the 2019 Hero Caribbean Pre­mier League T20 tour­na­ment.

The off-spin­ner had been out in­jured for a while as car­ti­lage dam­age to the spin­ning fin­ger on his right hand had pre­vent­ed him from tak­ing his place on the team.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, they need­ed him and he went out there like a true war­rior to take two wick­ets for 10 runs off his four overs to re­strict the Pa­tri­ots to 125-7 in their 20 overs. TKR then found it tough to get the runs but reached home at 128-4 with eight balls to spare.

The vic­to­ry took TKR to the sec­ond qual­i­fi­er, where they will meet the Bar­ba­dos Tri­dents, who lost yes­ter­day’s first qual­i­fi­er to the Guyana Ama­zon War­riors by 30 runs, at the Bri­an Lara Sta­di­um in Tarou­ba from 7 pm on Thurs­day. (See page A38)

Speak­ing af­ter the game, Nar­ine said: “Bowl­ing was a lit­tle painful but I must give thanks to God for giv­ing me the courage and mo­ti­va­tion. We have a great sup­port staff that has been treat­ing me for the last week and a half, so I must give thanks to them as well.”

He added, “I think the pitch helped the spin­ners a bit so it helped me in a way so that I didn’t have to put too much pres­sure on the fin­ger that was giv­ing me prob­lems. I think it was a to­tal team ef­fort. We need­ed this one.

“We get to play at home now so that’s even more com­fort­able and we have the fans back­ing us. I’m leav­ing it up to the med­ical staff and the man above to give me the strength and courage to hope­ful­ly play one more and if we win, to the fi­nals.”

TKR cap­tain Kieron Pol­lard, mean­while, said his side’s at­tempt at chas­ing 126 was not the right way to do it. Com­ing off a string of four loss­es in the round-robin phase, how­ev­er, he said he was hap­py to get over the mark.

“We’ve been striv­ing for this vic­to­ry for the last two and a half weeks. We thought bowl­ing first and re­strict­ing them to 125 should have been an easy walk but they made it dif­fi­cult,” Pol­lard said.

“I just want to thank the Guyana crowd for cheer­ing me on. If I’m hon­est, that was ex­act­ly how not to chase 126 runs. Just too many dot balls. If a bowler is hit­ting a length, you have got to try mov­ing around the crease and throw him off his length. You have to try some­thing and do it dif­fer­ent­ly.

“Hav­ing said that, there were ex­pe­ri­enced bat­ters out there. There are things we need to work on as West In­di­an bats­men in terms of ro­tat­ing the strike a lot more and it is some­thing that has kept us back. In this game, peo­ple around the Caribbean can see what we need to work on.”