In a flamboyant West Indies line-up known for its exuberance, there came a player into their XI on Wednesday evening whose droopy-eyed mien stood out amid all the flare and glare. In a match that was being billed as a battle of sixes entered Roston Chase, a low-key offspinner and a batter with a T20I strike rate of 121. In a game where he was supposed to take down the left-hand batters of England – as Shai Hope revealed at the toss – Chase dominated the oppositions’ right-hand batters, with both bat and ball.
For this game at the Wankhede, where Chase had never played a T20 before, West Indies found themselves in a spot of bother at 8 for 2 when Chase walked out. The Mumbai crowd was hungry for some big hits, but Jofra Archer was threatening to touch 150kph and the first three overs produced just a couple of boundaries.
Then came spin, within the powerplay. Will Jacks from around the wicket, with the two fielders in the deep at the midwicket and long-on boundaries, and Chase nonchalantly made room for three fours in a row of which two were dispatched on the off side. No fancy power-hitting, no unnecessary risk to try and clear the fielders at the ropes while hitting with the spin, just middling the ball to the boundary.
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For the West Indies innings that ended the powerplay with just one six, Chase was humming his own tune while fitting in the playlist of this West Indies side. Against Liam Dawson coming in from around the wicket, Chase quickly hopped to the off side and paddled a fired-in delivery fine enough to beat short fine-leg for four. Chase’s innings of 34 off 29 balls was nothing flashy but set the platform for the depredations of Sherfane Rutherford that were to follow.
By the time West Indies finished on a fighting 196, they had observed that the pitch was more favourable for spin than pace, as exhibited by Adil Rashid’s loopy legbreaks that gave him four boundary-less overs for just 16 and fetched him two wickets.
West Indies had been smart in bringing in the spin of Chase for the pace of Matthew Forde.
Except when they saw Phil Salt ping Akeal Hosein’s first delivery straight down the ground. Pace did go for runs – Jason Holder’s first over leaked 24 – and when the left-handed Jacob Bethell carved three more boundaries off Hosein, Hope knew it was time to change things up.
Chase got the ball as soon as the field spread out. But only one ball later he was up against the experienced ball-basher Jos Buttler, who not only had plenty of experience at the Wankhede but had also smashed Chase for 58 off 29 in five T20s before this game. And Buttler continued to dominate Chase. A flat delivery towards the pads flew off his bat so easily that it would have hardly given Chase time to think. But he did and immediately went around the wicket and whizzed the ball through the humid Mumbai air at a length that Buttler could neither get under easily nor get on top of and holed out at long-on.
This was evidence of the nous Chase has acquired from playing all three formats around the world without even getting into the IPL or playing more than six games in any T20 league barring the CPL.
At the Wankhede, with some of the IPL rockstars to bowl to, Chase kept changing his pace and varying his lengths to keep the likes of Bethell and Harry Brook on a leash. Chase would have also remembered that the delivery that had sent him back earlier was a googly that turned sharply from Rashid and trapped him on the back foot. With the powerful Jacks on strike, Chase used the same ploy and pinned the batter on the back foot right in front to run away in celebration as soon as the ball thudded into the pad.
“…After watching the England bowling innings, I thought that when the spinners were a bit slower, they got it to spin,” Chase said after the game. “So, that was my initial plan, especially to the left-handers, to just slow it up a bit so it could extract some turn from the wicket and just try to keep the stumps in play.
“I think that that’s one of the things that I really try to stick to, especially in white-ball cricket. I just try to keep the stumps in play. If the batsmen want to take a risk from off the stumps, I’m always in the game.”
By the time Chase was done for the night, he had conceded only 15 runs off his 13 balls to right-hand batters and sent back two of them.
As Gudakesh Motie continued to strike at the other end to take home more wickets on the night than Chase, it was the offspinner who bowled more stifling lines, fewer loose deliveries and casually capped off his memorable night with a low catch in the deep that sealed the game for West Indies to top the Group C table.
Not the Player of the Match, but Chase proved again that his substance lay in what he brings to the table, which reflects on the scorecard and not through his personality.
