The crick­et was great, the re­sult even bet­ter and the West In­di­an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the team at the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my in Tarou­ba on Wednes­day night, as ex­pressed in loud and vig­or­ous sup­port and with the in­tent of in­tim­i­dat­ing New Zealand, felt like a re­turn to the gold­en age of West In­dies crick­et.

When the DJ called for a full-throat­ed West In­di­an voice, the fans, who packed the stands and grounds to “Ral­ly Round the West In­dies”, a song com­posed in part to mourn the col­lapse of the 15-year-long reign of the teams of Sir Clive Lloyd and Sir Viv Richards, raised their voic­es to rekin­dle the West In­di­an spir­it.

Thank­ful­ly, medi­um pac­er Ro­mario Shep­herd, build­ing on the work of pac­er Alzarri Joseph, held his nerve to car­ry the Windies safe­ly to vic­to­ry af­ter the first three balls of the last over were rock­et­ed for three six­es.

The big news is that the three straight wins of skip­per Rov­man Pow­ell's West In­dies in this open­ing round have thrown them in­to the Su­per Eight, with sub­stance enough to force our way in­to the se­mi-fi­nals. One jump at a time though.

The en­gag­ing shouts of the crowd, not pre­dictable af­ter a very shaky start of their in­nings which led to po­si­tion of 56-6 and 112 for 9; the lat­ter was sure­ly not a score to face the tough New Zealand bat­ters with. But the hero of the match for the Windies, mid­dle-or­der bat­ter Sher­fane Ruther­ford, played a bril­liant six-hit­ting and men­tal­ly tough knock. He knew when to pick up the sin­gles and twos and when the end of the in­nings ap­proached, he was con­scious of hav­ing to ex­plode with six six­es to take the to­tal to a re­spectable and de­fend­able 149 for nine.

Apart from Ruther­ford’s un­beat­en 68 from 39 balls knock, earn­ing him the Man of the Match award, his was a les­son for the likes of Nicholas Pooran, Bran­don King, and John­son Charles, who gave away their wick­ets through the lack of crit­i­cal think­ing and ap­pli­ca­tion to the task of mak­ing runs.

Yes, the T20 for­mat is about big hit­ting and scor­ing runs quick­ly; but the need is to ju­di­cial­ly mix the tow­er­ing six­es with strate­gi­cal­ly placed sin­gles, twos and threes.

It has been a se­ri­ous weak­ness in the West In­di­an game for a cou­ple decades with­out full at­ten­dance to this need­ed means of build­ing ad­e­quate and big to­tals in the T20 game.

Over­all, it was a sol­id team per­for­mance.

It is al­so good to see An­dre Rus­sel vig­or­ous­ly and com­mit­ted­ly back in the team; sad once again to wit­ness one of the most tal­ent­ed stroke-mak­ers in Caribbean and world crick­et, Shim­ron Het­mey­er, not in the fi­nal team; pre­vi­ous per­son­al de­ci­sions not to make him­self avail­able to the West In­dies for no recog­nis­able rea­son have lost him his form and place. But he is still a young man.

The work is now ahead for the play­ers, coach­es and ad­min­is­tra­tors to en­sure the se­ri­ous ef­fort at the BLCA is tak­en in­to the game against Afghanistan and in­to the Su­per 8 round.