Trinidad & Tobago played their 1st match of the Champions League and they started off their campaign in style by beating Justin Langer’s Somerset by 44 runs.
Daren Ganga won the toss and elected to bat 1st at the Chinnaswamy stadium and the side from the Caribbean posted a competitive 150/9 in their 20 overs. In reply, Somerset folded up for 106 with 9 of their 11 batsmen getting out for single digit scores. Somerset who’d beaten the IPL champions Deccan Chargers in their 1st match will now await the result of the clash between them and T&T to know which teams would be through to the next round.
The T&T innings was characterised by batsmen who were all willing to play their shots despite the fact that they were perishing after a while in the process of doing that. Lendl Simons who’d made a fine impression on the tour of England got off to an aggressive start, especially with the 4th over of the match going for 3 boundaries.
His partner William Perkins soon joined in the action as well and maintaining a healthy run rate was never a problem. But none of their batsmen could even reach an individual score of 40, a testimony to the fact that they kept losing wickets in their pursuit of runs. Darren Bravo hit the 1st ball he faced for a 6 but couldn’t do much beyond that while his brother Dwayne Bravo fell 1st ball. Dinesh Ramdin was the top scorer with his 39 coming of as many balls and Sherin Ganga’s heroics at the end pushed the team score to 150. Charl Willoughby was the most successful bowler in the park with figures of 4-0-35-3.
Somerset could never really get things going as the slow bowlers from T&T suffocated the batsmen with some good line and length bowling. Leg spinner Samuel Badree was introduced in the 3rd over itself and alongwith Dave Mohammad, he made a fine impression in the game.
The side had only made 44/3 till the end of the 10th over and things weren’t getting easier with none of the batsmen being able to break free. Zander de Bruyn top scored with 43 but there was precious little to write about the others. Dwayne Bravo was the most successful bowler with his 4 overs giving him 4 wickets and costing him only 23 runs.
Sherwin Ganga was declared the ‘Man of the Match’ for his late order hitting and for also taking 2 wickets with the ball. The side next plays Deccan Chargers on Wednesday in the final league game of the 1st round matches.