Sampson savours West Indies debut despite defeat

DUBAI – In the af­ter­glow of a hard-fought but ul­ti­mate­ly dis­ap­point­ing open­ing T20 In­ter­na­tion­al against Afghanistan in the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, the West In­dies camp found a sil­ver lin­ing in the com­posed de­but of young bats­man Quentin Samp­son.

While the hosts fell short by 38 runs, Samp­son emerged as a bea­con of re­silience, top-scor­ing for the side with a cru­cial 30 runs against a for­mi­da­ble Afghan at­tack.

Step­ping on­to the in­ter­na­tion­al stage for the first time, the 25-year-old spoke with a mix­ture of awe and analy­sis in a post-match in­ter­view.

“Well, I was out of words,” Samp­son said, re­flect­ing on re­ceiv­ing his cap. “You know, whilst go­ing out on the field, it was some­thing like a strange, strange feel­ing. You know that you want­ed to be here for some time. You just can’t imag­ine that it is al­ready here.”

For Samp­son, the priv­i­lege of shar­ing the dress­ing room was as sig­nif­i­cant as his time in the mid­dle. “Yeah, it was a great ex­pe­ri­ence. Rub­bing shoul­ders with a lot of se­nior play­ers who, you know, I grew up look­ing at play­ing crick­et. It was a good feel­ing to just be around them and learn new things.”

His knock, though not a match-win­ning one, show­cased a ma­tu­ri­ty that bodes well for the fu­ture. How­ev­er, Samp­son was quick to shift fo­cus from per­son­al achieve­ment to the team’s ar­eas for im­prove­ment. He of­fered a frank as­sess­ment of the bat­ting col­lapse that saw the Windies stum­ble in their chase.

“Well, I’d say that we need to be more pa­tient, choose our balls wise­ly. They were bowl­ing well, but we have to cap­i­talise on the few loose balls, and we didn’t.”

The debu­tant didn’t shy away from cri­tiquing the bowl­ing per­for­mance ei­ther, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the cost­ly death overs where Afghanistan ac­cel­er­at­ed.

“Yeah, I would like to see the team re­al­ly tight­en up in our bowl­ing. You can see we’re go­ing for runs in the back­end. Just tight­en up with the bowl­ing and let the se­nior play­ers, who have a lot of ex­pe­ri­ence, go about their busi­ness.”

CMC