Eight Teams Finalized For The 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup!

England and West Indies kicked off the five-match one-day series with a rain-affected game in Manchester on Tuesday (19th September).

Windies were off to a flying toss after winning the toss and the duo of Chris Gayle and Evin Lewis gave the visitors a flying start but once, Lewis and Gayle departed the innings went visionless and the scoring rate came down at a fast rate.

It was the skipper Jason Holder who later in the innings got the Caribbean team past 200. In reply, England lost Alex Hales quickly but after that, it was Jonny Bairstow show, as the swashbuckling batsman smashed his maiden hundred.

With this defeat, the chances of Windies’ direct qualification for World Cup are now over, as with 78 points they cannot go past Sri Lanka who have 86 points up their sleeve.

The cut-off date for direct qualification is 30th September and ICC has made it clear that from the next World Cup only top eight teams will qualify directly and the other two spots will be decided by a qualification round.

Even if Windies beat England in all the remaining matches they cannot topple the Lankan team and hence now have to go through a qualification round which is disheartening to see, for a team who dominated World cricket back in the late 80s and early 90s.

The qualification round, however, doesn’t seem to affect the batting coach of the Calypso team one bit.

“You always know there’s the potential of that [not qualifying direct], we knew it was going to be a tough ask,” said Toby Radford, West Indies’ batting coach. “But we are very positive as a group and are trying to develop in all formats. If it means the qualifiers next year, it means the qualifiers next year, and we’ll build our way back up.”