da 888： West Indies captain Carl Hooper said he was very disappointed with theresult yesterday as the West Indies fell to defeat by 37 runs in thesecond Cable & Wireless Test against India at the Queen’s Park Oval,Trinidad
Ezra Stuart24-Apr-2002West Indies captain Carl Hooper said he was very disappointed with theresult yesterday as the West Indies fell to defeat by 37 runs in thesecond Cable & Wireless Test against India at the Queen’s Park Oval,Trinidad.I think coming into the last day here, we really fancied our chancesand it was disappointing the way we sort of ended up, 30-odd runsshort, Hooper told reporters after the match.Set a challenging 313 runs for victory, the Windies fell for 275,digging their own grave with most of the batsmen falling to falsestrokes rather than brilliant deliveries from the visitors.The captain said that at no stage did he give up on the West Indiesgetting the runs needed for victory.Right to the very last end, I thought that we had a chance. Thirtyodd runs is not a lot runs but you needed somebody. Shiv [Chanderpaul]maybe needed to take a few more chances but that’s the game, Hoopernoted.Chanderpaul remained 67 not out as wickets fell all around him.I thought from the outset they would try to make runs difficult tocome by and that’s what they did. They bowled straight and locked upboth the offside and onside, He said.The thing to do, I suppose is to capitalise on the bad balls and keepthe scoreboard ticking with the singles. I think it was a bitunfortunate we lost Brian [Lara] and then almost immediately after,myself.That set us back a whole lot and obviously put the pressure on peoplelike Chris Gayle, who I thought played well and ShivnarineChanderpaul, Hooper said.Despite losing his second consecutive Test at the venue after the lossto South Africa last year, Hooper said he could find no fault with thepitch.We had the knowledgeable experts predicting how it was going to playand so on but I thought we had a belter of a Test wicket, Hooperdeclared.Coach Roger Harper also expressed disappointment with losing the Testand going down 1-0 in the five-match series.This is very disappointing. We had a similar situation here againstSouth Africa last year and most members of the team were here and weshould have learnt from that experience and unfortunately we came upshort, Harper said.I think, you can’t fault the effort. Everyone fought hard but I thinkwe need to play a little smarter, added Harper.He noted the batsmen’s failure to carry on for bigger scorescontributed to the Windies’ inadequate totals of 245 and 275 in theTest.In Guyana, we managed to put a very good total on the board. One ofthe things we talked about there was that batsmen that got in, got tostart carrying on. I think here we didn’t see that, Harper noted.He also zeroed in on the West Indies’ bowling in the first session onthe opening day after India were sent in to bat.I thought we definitely could’ve bowled a lot better in that firstsession. Had we done that, it may have meant India making 40, 50 less,Harper conceded.