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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

West Indies need to score quicker—Matthews

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SPORTS DESK
884 days ago
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Captain Hayley Matthews drives during her 20 for West Indies against Pakistan on Sunday.           (PICTURE ICC Media)

Captain Hayley Matthews drives during her 20 for West Indies against Pakistan on Sunday. (PICTURE ICC Media)

PAARL, South Africa (CMC) —West In­dies cap­tain Hay­ley Matthews has rued the lack of dy­namism in her side’s bat­ting de­spite their three-run win over Pak­istan in the Women’s Twen­ty20 World Cup on Sun­day.

The Caribbean side could on­ly muster 116 for six from their 20 overs, open­er Rasha­da Williams top-scor­ing with 30 from 34 de­liv­er­ies and She­maine Camp­belle (22) and Matthews (20) play­ing sup­port­ing roles.

How­ev­er, no oth­er bats­man passed 11 as West In­dies once again failed to re­al­ly spark with the bat.

“We would like to score a bit quick­er than that, but I mean, at the end of the day, it’s crick­et,” Matthews told a post-match me­dia con­fer­ence.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, there’s some ar­eas that we def­i­nite­ly need to im­prove on and that’s go­ing to be one of them. We haven’t fin­ished as well as we would like to this en­tire World Cup with the bat, but now is a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for us to go and re­group. We keep say­ing we have a lot of young in­ex­pe­ri­enced play­ers with­in the team, and ex­pe­ri­ences like this are just go­ing to help us learn more and more, and that’s ex­act­ly what we plan on do­ing mov­ing for­ward.”

West In­dies racked up 135 in their open­ing sev­en-wick­et loss to Eng­land be­fore gath­er­ing 118 in their sec­ond match to In­dia, when they suf­fered a six-wick­et de­feat.

They chased down 138 to beat Ire­land with a ball to spare on Fri­day but their fluc­tu­a­tion con­tin­ued against Pak­istan with a mea­gre to­tal af­ter choos­ing to bat first at Boland Park.

“I think com­ing in­to this tour­na­ment—the scores we were putting up—the way we were bat­ting wasn’t great,” ex­plained Matthews.

“And I think even though we have a lot of room to im­prove still, we would have seen some im­prove­ments through­out this tour­na­ment, which has been good to see. We still have a lot of progress that can be made, but I think this World Cup is def­i­nite­ly done and it’s do­ing a lot for the girls with their learn­ing.

“So much learn­ing has tak­en place with­in the dress­ing room and out on the field as well and we can on­ly con­tin­ue to hope that we’re mov­ing in the right di­rec­tion.

“I think that’s our main goal right now and even with­in our loss­es, we just re­al­ly tried to take all the pos­i­tives out of it that we can learn from them.”

De­spite the small to­tal, West In­dies pro­duced a ster­ling ef­fort in the field, Matthews lead­ing the at­tack with a Play­er-of-the-Match two for 14 from four overs of off-spin.

Fel­low off-spin­ner Kar­ish­ma Ramharack and new-ball seam­er Chinelle Hen­ry al­so turned in miser­ly spells, be­fore fast bowler Shamil­ia Con­nell man­aged to hold her nerve in the fi­nal over when Pak­istan need­ed four runs from the fi­nal de­liv­ery to tie the con­test.

“De­fend­ing 118, 119 is nev­er, ever go­ing to be easy, and the way that we re­al­ly went out there and threw our bod­ies at the ball, the way our bowlers stepped up to the plate where we knew it was go­ing to be a tough task, was just beau­ti­ful,” said Matthews.

“Not on­ly to be a part of, but to watch the oth­er girls do it as well and hold their own, was just a bril­liant sight to see.”

The vic­to­ry was the sec­ond in four games for West In­dies, leav­ing them third in Group 2 on four points, be­hind lead­ers Eng­land (six points) and Eng­land (four points).


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