Evin Lewis 91 helps West Indies to seven-wicket win. Image Source: ICC[/caption]Internet Desk: Evin Lewis scored a frenetic 91 off 51 balls as West Indies brushed Pakistan aside by seven wickets in the third of four Twenty20 Internationals at Queen's Park Oval in Trinidad on Saturday.
Responding to Pakistan’s 137 for 8, Lewis hit nine sixes and five fours in a blitz that took West Indies past the target to 138 for 3 in just 14.5 overs and kept the series alive going into the final match on Sunday at the same venue with Pakistan 2-1 ahead.
Lewis’s assault on the bowling was in stark contrast to the struggles of most of the Pakistani batsmen, with the exception of Kamran Akmal and Babar Azam, as Pakistan went from a solid 92 for 2 in 12 overs to just 137, adding only 45 runs in the last eight overs.
Lewis lost Chadwick Walton, his opening partner, early on in the chase to an excellent diving catch by Fakhar Zaman running in from the square-leg boundary off Sohail Tanvir. But Tanvir was later manhandled by Lewis when, in the 14th over, he was sent for 24 runs, an assault that ended the match as a contest.
Marlon Samuels helped Lewis add 56 runs for the second wicket and Jason Mohammed, the debutant, looked good in scoring 17 not out and adding 76 in a third-wicket stand with Lewis.
But everything paled in comparison to Lewis’s relentless assault, which ended with victory in sight as Wahab Riaz held the catch at long-off to give Shadab Khan a wicket.
Shadab, Man of the Match in the first two games, struggled to recapture the same control under the pressure imposed by Lewis, and to a lesser extent the other top-order batsmen.
Earlier, Akmal (48) and Azam (43) had Pakistan well poised for a total in excess of 160 after they chose to bat first as they put on 88 runs for the third wicket after Samuel Badree (2 for 22) had removed Ahmed Shehzad and Imad Wasim in the first over of the match.
However, the introduction of Samuels for his first bowl in international cricket for 18 months earned the home side a vital breakthrough and turned the tide. Samuels’s first delivery was a waist-high full toss, which Akmal swung to Lendl Simmons on the mid-wicket boundary.
Shoaib Malik, Pakistan’s top scorer in the three-run win on Thursday at the same venue, didn’t last long as he flicked a full-length delivery from Carlos Brathwaite to Lewis at long-leg.
Pakistan struggled for runs the rest of the way with a desperate West Indies battling to limit the total to manageable limits.
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