Australian skipper, Aaron Finch, after winning the toss opted to bowl first against the West Indies side who took field without their regular captain Kieron Pollard. Nichloas Pooran was the stand-in captain for the Windies for this game.
Australian bowlers proved their captain's decision to bowl first correct by bowling out half the Windies for around 100 runs on board. Josh Hazlewood, who is known for his Test records showed exemplary discipline and bowled the perfect lines and lengths and proved yet again that perfect line and length can make you successful even in shortest of the formats. He was bowling right on the money from the word go and made life difficult for the West Indies batters.
As a matter of fact, Australian bowlers made St.Lucia look like Perth. By the way they were extracting bounce from the pitch, they would have made a mockery of anyy batting line up. Andre Russell was the lone warrior for the West Indies side and deserves all the appreciation in the world for his 51(28) with a mighty strike rate of 182 at a time when all the other players failed to score even at 110(SR).
While batting, Australia started off quite positively and were cruising the game with just 60 required from 77 balls but once Moises Henriques 16(8) got out while chasing an unnecessary wide delivery off Fabien Allen, they just went down like a pack of cards and lost their last 6 wickets for just 22 runs and handed over an easy victory to the West Indies. The shot selections of all the Australian players needs to be questioned, starting from Finch to Christian. The stand-in captain for this game, Nicholas Pooran, was spot on with his field placements and rotated his bowlers extremely well. The combined figures of Obed McCoy, Fabian Allen and Hayden Walsh in theis game was 11-0-73-9 . This trio just took the game away from Australia towards the end. This was a great opportunity for Australia to defeat West Indies, as they would not just have gone 1-0 up but would also have got huge boost in terms of confidence which could have helped then in their quest of winning this series as it is a known fact that the first game of a series sets the tone for the rest of the series to follow.
