Sammy takes over West Indies captaincy

It's difficult to underplay the difficulty that Darren Sammy will have bringing unity to the West Indies side after being asked to takeover the captaincy by the WICB from Chris Gayle. With various players, including Gayle and Bravo, not accepting contracts from the Board, there are bound to be cliques opening up and Sammy can't claim to be in consideration for a slot in a World XI in the way that Gayle can.

Let's hope for the sake of West Indies cricket that Gayle is totally supportive of Sammy - if his previous protestations that he wasn't that fussed about the captaincy were true, then he should be.

Essex comings and goings

It's been quite a season for Essex as the Mail Online documents, and Paul Grayson has done a good job of steering them through. But I can't say I'm in favour of shipping in Dwayne Bravo for Twenty20 finals day. If they have that attitude then surely young players will be reluctant to go there, and if I was Kevin Pietersen - looking to come into the side only when it suited me and the ECB - I'd be approaching Essex.

Somewhere between Hampshire's attitude and Essex's lies the answer, but it's got to be far closer to Hampshire's end of the scale surely?

An incredible game!

I suspect Shivnarine Chanderpaul will dine out on this one for a little while....with 10 needed to win off the last two balls of the match aginst Sri Lanka he hit a 4 and 6 to win the game with 9 wickets down. The sort of stuff dreams are made of - it's times like this I wish I had Sky to see the highlights!!

Chanderpaul had earlier been involved in a mix up with Dwayne Bravo which looked to have cost West Indies the match, but he seems to have kept a cool head to bring his team victory. Chaminda Vaas was the unlucky bowler - fortunately he should be experienced enough to put this behind him pretty quickly.

You can see the scorecard here.