Crick­et­ing fans and even pa­tri­ot­ic Trin­bag­o­ni­ans are still reel­ing to­day from the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers’ nine-wick­et loss to the Bar­ba­dos Roy­als in the Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) elim­i­na­tor match at the Prov­i­dence Sta­di­um in Guyana on Tues­day night.

If one were un­sure of this, they on­ly had to take a cur­so­ry glance yes­ter­day at ac­tiv­i­ty on so­cial me­dia, where videos, memes and con­ver­sa­tions were dom­i­nat­ed by con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

Even star TKR all-rounder An­dre Rus­sell took to his so­cial net­work to voice his dis­gust over a de­ci­sion he felt robbed his team of a fair chance at mov­ing on to the next phase.

Of course, many of the ar­gu­ments sur­round­ed whether the of­fi­cials at the sta­di­um some­how con­spired to ma­nip­u­late the flood­lights to en­sure three of them went down in the fi­nal over of TKR’s in­nings, on­ly to be­come func­tion­al af­ter an over two-hour de­lay just min­utes be­fore the cut-off time that would have seen Kieron Pol­lard’s men qual­i­fy based on their bet­ter stand­ing at the end of the pre­lim­i­nary phase.

That the Guyana Pow­er and Light Com­pa­ny Inc (GPL) and the Min­istry of Cul­ture, Youth and Sport dis­tanced them­selves from the de­ba­cle while not­ing that the sta­di­um had an in­de­pen­dent pow­er source and that GPL of­fi­cials were on­ly there on stand­by to help in a case of an emer­gency, on­ly added fu­el to the fire.

The em­bar­rass­ment of an elec­tri­cal prob­lem cre­at­ing such a sce­nario in the first place will leave a stain on the CPL that they will not soon clean away. Fur­ther­more, a late state­ment from them last evening did noth­ing to as­suage the fans that they were re­morse­ful for what oc­curred.

In­stead, the state­ment fo­cused on what tran­spired be­tween the match of­fi­cials and the play­ers, nev­er apol­o­gis­ing to the al­ready emo­tion­al­ly charged fans re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly for the fi­as­co.

Truth be told, fans would have loved to see both teams bat­tle it out on the field of play with their full al­lot­ment of 20 overs. 

But with an on-song TKR wick­et-keep­er bats­man Nicholas Pooran nine runs away from a sec­ond suc­ces­sive cen­tu­ry, the un­for­tu­nate black­out oc­curred. And once the Duck­worth-Lewis-Stern method was ap­plied to the match, it was al­ways go­ing to favour the side bat­ting sec­ond since Rov­man Pow­ell’s men knew ex­act­ly what they need­ed to achieve.

Still, fans may al­so have to ques­tion TKR skip­per Pol­lard’s tac­tics, since de­fend­ing 60 runs in five overs should have been man­age­able giv­en the bowl­ing ar­se­nal he had.

The use of mys­tery spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine was a no-brain­er but leav­ing out left-arm or­tho­dox spin­ner Akeal Ho­sein, who has been the go-to open­ing bowler for the en­tire sea­son, with sub­stan­tial suc­cess, was ques­tion­able. Ho­sein had proven him­self not on­ly as an open­ing weapon but was just as lethal when called up­on to take wick­ets in the mid­dle overs when bats­men were set.

Need­less to say, there was an ar­gu­ment to be made for TKR’s short­com­ings on the field and the CPL’s fail­ings be­yond the bound­ary on Tues­day night. Hope­ful­ly, all will learn from this in­ci­dent ahead of next year’s edi­tion of the tour­na­ment.