Related Link : West Indies in England 2007
West Indies have won their warm up One Dayer at Worcester despite having only half of their main players. The differently looking West Indian side successfully chased a massive target of 175 from 24 overs. The heroes of the day for the tourists were Runako Morton and Denesh Ramdin. It was a rain truncated game at the County Ground.
There were lot of embarrassing problems for the West Indians going into this match. They couldn’t get 11 players out of their original One Day Squad. Three players who had to join the squad namely Dwayne Smith, Austin Richards and Lendl Simmons were not going to reach the UK on time for this match. To add to that there were quite a few players who sat out because of injuries. Some of the Test Players not a part of the One Day Squad were asked to stay back as a cover for this game. But inspite of that the West Indies’ team management had to ask seven West Indians playing in the UK league to come to the rescue. One of those seven players was Mali Richards, son of the great Viv Richards!
The Vikram Solanki led England Lions won the toss and batted first. Solanki opened the batting with Jefferson to put on a rapid 75 for the first wicket. Both batsmen were dismissed by off spinner Marlon Samuels in their thirties. Samuels’ bowling was difficult to put away as he ended up with miserly figures of 3 for 16 in his 5 overs. West Indies got their runs with five balls to spare and seven wickets in hand. Denesh Ramdin who opened the batting with Skipper Gayle secured the match with a 130-run stand for the second wicket with Morton. Gayle flopped yet again on this tour falling with a single digit score. Ramdin smashed 73 from 52 balls while Morton guided his team to their first victory on this tour by staying unbeaten on 72 from 61. The English bowling had James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Kabir Ali. Windies take on Derbyshire in the last warm up game before getting into the Twenty20 Internationals and the ODIs.