Two for Seven, Then Seventeen Off Eight: Gudakesh Motie Wins It for Barbados Off the Final Ball

Twenty overs each, one run between them going into the final delivery, and a left-arm spinner at the crease who had spent the first half of the evening bowling three overs for seven. Kensington Oval has seen a lot of cricket. It has not seen many nights that tidy.

The Barbados Tridents beat the Jamaica Kingsmen by two wickets with nothing to spare — no balls remaining, two wickets standing — and the man at the heart of both halves was Gudakesh Motie.

Maaz Sadaqat played the innings of the night for the losing side: 47 from 34, three fours and two sixes, and the only Kingsmen batter who looked entirely certain about what the pitch was doing. With Usman Khan he took the score to 73 for 2 in the tenth, and at 86 for 3 in the twelfth the Kingsmen were set for a total north of 170.

Then Motie bowled. Three overs, seven runs, two wickets — figures that in a Twenty20 innings at a ground this size are close to absurd. Rovman Powell went for 8 from 12. Keemo Paul made 5 from 12. Andre Russell came out swinging and got 10 from 4 before holing out, and the Kingsmen lost four wickets for twenty-six runs across the middle.

Jakeem Pollard took 3 for 38 and Daniel Sams 2 for 41, but it was Motie's spell that turned a big total into a gettable one. Keacy Carty's 15 from 7 and Hassan Khan's 16 from 12 hauled the innings up to 150 for 9, which on the balance of the first fifteen overs was daylight robbery in Barbados' favour.

Chasing 151, the Tridents contrived to make it look impossible almost immediately. Zachary Carter went at 15, Brandon King for 18 at 30, Rivaldo Clarke for 1 at 33 — three down inside six overs, with Quinton de Kock still trying to work out which shots were available.

De Kock never really did. He made 14 from 16 and fell at 63 in the eleventh, and by the time Sherfane Rutherford went for 5 the Tridents were 76 for 5 in the fourteenth and needed 75 from 40 balls.

Shadrack Descarte was the one constant. His 56 from 42 — six fours, two sixes — was not a violent innings so much as a correct one; he picked the bowler to attack (Odean Smith's two overs went for 21) and refused to take on Hunain Shah, who finished with 4-0-25-2 and was comfortably the best of the Kingsmen attack.

When Descarte fell at 107 in the seventeenth over, 44 were still needed from 23 balls. Chris Green made 17 from 12 and went at 134 with seven balls left. That brought Motie in at 134 for 8, needing 17.

He hit two fours and a six. Ghazanfar, at the other end, faced three balls for 3 and did the single most valuable thing available to him, which was to give the strike back.

It came down to the final delivery with the scores level at 150, and Barbados got the run. Two wickets in hand, none to spare — the sort of finish that makes a nonsense of the idea that a chase is ever really under control.

For the Kingsmen it is a brutal way to lose a game they led for roughly seventeen of the forty overs. Hunain Shah and Vitel Lawes bowled beautifully at the death and still finished on the wrong side of it. For Barbados, a win at home built on a spell of 3-0-7-2 and then finished by the same pair of hands.