One Day, Two Results: Cayman Scrape Home, Then Rawlins and Sabir Take Bermuda 149 Without Loss

Double-headers have a way of telling you two different stories about the same teams, and Wednesday at the Jimmy Powell Oval told two that barely seemed to belong to the same day. The tournament's 1st Match, washed out without a ball bowled on September 20, was replayed first. It was a grinding, low-scoring affair that Cayman Islands won by two wickets with nine balls to spare after very nearly talking themselves out of it. Then the same two sides came back out and Bermuda won by ten wickets, their openers never parted.

Match 1: Bermuda 113 all out (19.2 overs); Cayman Islands 115 for 8 (18.3 overs). Match 2: Cayman Islands 143 for 5 (20 overs); Bermuda 149 for 0 (16.4 overs). One apiece. And running through both games was Delray Rawlins, who took 4 for 15 in a losing cause in the first and made 67 not out to win the second.

Cayman's win in the first game was built with the ball. Bermuda chose to bat and were 4 for 2 almost immediately — Rawlins caught off Romeo Dunka for 3, Dominic Sabir bowled by Vick Dhaniram for 1 — and 21 for 3 not long after. Kamau Leverock and Isaiah O'Brien rebuilt with a 50-run stand from 46 balls, taking Bermuda to 71 at the end of the twelfth over, but two wickets fell on that same score and the last seven went for 42. Cayman used seven bowlers and every one of them took a wicket. Adrian Wright's 3-0-10-2, which included Leverock, was the tightest spell of the innings; Dunka's three for 27 did the most damage.

The chase ought to have been straightforward. Jermaine Baker and Andre McCarthy each hit two sixes, and at 84 for 3 Cayman needed only 30 more. Then the innings went 84, 91, 92, 96, 102 — five wickets for 18 runs, four of the eight wickets going to Rawlins, and the score 102 for 8 after 17 overs. It took the ninth-wicket pair of Romario Edwards (11 not out from 8, with a four and a six) and Malcolm Ramlogan (2 not out) to find the last 13 runs. Nine balls to spare looks comfortable on the scorecard. It did not feel comfortable in the seventeenth over.

The second game started as another Bermuda squeeze. Cayman chose to bat, lost Baker, Bishal Kharty, McCarthy and Sachin Diwangana, and were 52 for 4. Kevon Fubler's two overs cost only nine runs and took two of those wickets. Then Ramon Sealy, who had raced to 33 from 21 with five fours and a six, retired hurt at 64 in the ninth over, and Cayman lost their most fluent batter without losing a wicket.

What followed was Cayman's best passage of the day. Vick Dhaniram (27 from 32) and Romeo Dunka added 64 from 52 balls, and Dunka's four sixes in an unbeaten 43 from 27 took the hosts to 143 for 5. It was thirty more than anyone had managed batting first that day. It turned out to be nowhere near enough.

Sabir and Rawlins did not so much chase 144 as walk straight past it. They added 149 from 100 balls without being separated, eight sixes and eleven fours between them, and Bermuda finished with 20 balls in hand. Cayman tried seven bowlers again. Andre McCarthy's 4-1-16-0 was the only spell that stopped the scoring, and Dunka, the hero with the bat, went for 32 in 1.4 overs.

It would be unfair to read the second game as Cayman simply falling apart. They were 52 for 4 and short of a batter, and they still fought back to 143. The trouble is that their batting has now had two middle-over wobbles in a day, 84 for 3 to 102 for 8 in the first game and 22 for 2 to 52 for 4 in the second. In the second game they recovered with the bat, then ran into an opening pair who gave their bowlers nothing to work with.

The positives are real, though. Dunka took three wickets in the first game and top-scored in the second. Dhaniram took the key early wicket of Sabir in the first game and anchored the rebuild in the second. And the bowling in the first game, when seven bowlers all took wickets and Bermuda were held to 113, shows a side that can squeeze. Sealy's 33 from 21 before he retired hurt also showed what the top order can do when it gets going.

The two games played very differently. The first produced 228 runs for 18 wickets, both sides scoring at around six an over, with wickets shared across both attacks. The second produced 292 runs for 5 wickets: Cayman scored at just over seven an over, and Bermuda at almost nine. We can't tell from the scorecard whether the pitch eased or the batting simply got braver, but in both innings of the second game the bowlers struggled to hold the batters back once they got in. Dunka and Dhaniram took 64 from 52 balls, and Bermuda's openers went faster still.

One constant across both games: Rawlins and Fubler did well each time they bowled for Bermuda. Fubler finished the day with 3 for 29 from five overs.

Some cricketers have a good day. Rawlins had a whole tournament's worth in one. His scores read 3 and 67 not out, which is 70 runs for once out. His bowling read 4 for 15 and 1 for 22, which is five wickets for 37 in eight overs. He was on the losing side in the first game despite taking four wickets, and he made sure Bermuda weren't on the losing side in the second.

The four wickets in the first game (Baker caught and bowled, McCarthy bowled, Diwangana and Dhaniram both caught) are what turned a comfortable Cayman chase into a scramble. The 67 from 45 in the second, with five fours and four sixes, is what turned a competitive Cayman total into a formality. Dominic Sabir deserves his own line here too. After being bowled by Dhaniram for 1 from two balls in the first game, he batted through the second game for 73 not out from 55, the top score of the day, and finished with 74 runs for once out.

Hours after being bowled for 1, he was still batting when Bermuda won.

Our preview was written for a single Cayman Islands vs Bermuda meeting on September 23, billed as the 4th Match. It assumed the two sides would already have played on September 20, and that game was in the end abandoned without a ball bowled. So the rematch it described never quite happened. Instead the replayed opener and the second meeting were played on the same day.

The call itself was that home advantage leaned the game towards Cayman Islands, with a warning that Bermuda were "not a side to be dismissed" and that winning the powerplay contest could turn things their way. That comes out at half right. Cayman did win the first game, if only just. In the second, Bermuda's openers did exactly what the preview warned about, only much more emphatically, and the prediction that the match was "unlikely to be one-sided" did not survive a ten-wicket margin. The preview named no individual players, so we can't claim to have spotted Rawlins or Sabir.

The head-to-head between the hosts and Bermuda is level at 1-1, and the North America Cup now turns to the Bahamas. Cayman Islands play the Bahamas twice on September 24, and the Bahamas then meet Bermuda twice on September 25. Those four games decide who reaches the final on September 27 and who plays in the third-place play-off on September 26.

Bermuda go into their Bahamas games with the momentum of a ten-wicket win and the in-form pair at the top of the order. Cayman go into theirs having shown they can defend and chase low scores. What they need is a batting line-up that doesn't lose three or four wickets in a handful of overs — and, if possible, Ramon Sealy fit enough to bat through an innings.