Latest update March 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 17, 2018 Sports
Says Sean Devers
The West Indies ‘B’ team led by Guyanese Keeper Anthony Bramble enjoyed a wonderful tournament in the Canada Dry Global T20 at the Maple Leaf Cricket Club in King City, Ontario, despite playing against a galaxy of International stars.
The team, with an average age of 22, surprised many by reaching the Final with great team cricket before their worst performance in the tournament saw then being beaten by Chris Gayle’s Vancouver Knights.
West Indies ‘B’ won their first four matches but lost the next two leading up to the finals.
Vancouver Knights collected $500,000 Canadian dollars, while West Indies took home $250,000 in addition to earning Cricket West Indies some big ‘bucks’ for sending a team to the three-week tournament as one of the six teams.
The tournament included 22 matches and according to Cricket Canada’s President Ranjit Saini the West Indies is a sponsor of the League and partnered to assist Cricket Canada in the conduct of the tournament and got a fee for sending a team.
Brian Lara is the tournament Ambassador of a league owned by Mercuri Canada Limited which is run by Sriram Bakthisaran, an Indian entrepreneur.
Mercuri signed a Masters License Agreement with Cricket Canada to own and operate the League for 25 years and is the sole owner of the League but aims to have investors buy five of the six teams next year.
Cricket Canada will benefit by Mercuri paying an annual fee of US$500,000 for the first year with an increment of US$100,000 each year for the next five years. From the sixth year Cricket Canada will get the stipulated fee or 10% of the gross profit or whichever is higher.
Shahid Afridi, Dwayne Bravo, Chris Gayle, Chris Lynn, Lasith Malinga, David Miller, Sunil Narine, Andre Russell, Darren Sammy and Steve Smith were the marquee players and paid US$100,000 each.
The others got from US$3,000 to US$90,000 but the player who made the biggest was Guyanese all-rounder Sherfane Rutherford.
The 19-year-old Rutherford scored the only century in the tournament with a sensational unbeaten 134 from just 66 balls and his 10 sixes equalled Evin Lewis’s 10 during his 96.
Rutherford reached the boundary 17 times and cleared it on 19 occasions in compiling 230 runs and was only behind Simmons (23) and Andrew Russell (20) for the most sixes in the tournament.
Rutherford scored more than any of his team mates although Nicolas Pooran (176), Justin Greaves (171), Fabien Allen (169), Brandon King (179) and Shamar Springer (133) all scored fifties.
Only 21-year-old St Lucian Obed McCoy, who had 11 with a best of 4-22 and 29-year-old Jamaican Derval Green with eight wickets, got more wickets than Rutherford’s seven for West Indies ‘B’.
Only Lendl Simmons (321) and South African Erasmus van der Dussen (255) scored runs than the left-handed Rutherford who hails from Enmore and plays for DCC in the City.
It won’t be such a bad idea to pick Rutherford in the squad against a not so strong Bangladesh side for the ODI series which starts on Sunday at Providence where he made his First-Class debut last year.
The first two matches of the three-match series will be played in Guyana and if Rutherford is selected along with Kemo Paul and Shimron Hetymer this could help to galvanise a capacity crowd to provide the type of atmosphere which has been absent at any of the grounds which hosted matches involving Sri Lanka and Bangladesh this season.
Listen to the man that is throwing Guyanese bright future away
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