Hetmyer inspires West Indies thrash Zimbabwe by 107.
Three wickets, one over, hearts broken. Cricket is beautiful, until it isn’t.
The Wankhede Stadium is a fortress of noise on good days. But on Monday, it became something else entirely. It became a slaughterhouse.
For the men in maroon, this was a coronation. For the men in red, it was a funeral.
Shimron Hetmyer walked out to bat like a man who had been waiting his whole life for this moment. Every six that disappeared into the Mumbai night was a message: we are here, we are hungry, we are not done. Thirty-four balls. Eighty-five runs. The kind of innings that children will try to replicate in narrow lanes tomorrow, using tennis balls and homemade bats, pretending they are him.
Rovman Powell, beside him, was no less ruthless. Thirty-five balls. Fifty-nine runs. Together, they turned a cricket ground into a carnival of destruction. Nineteen sixes. Sixteen fours. Two hundred and fifty-four runs. The kind of number that breaks a team before they even walk out to chase.
And in the dressing room across the field, the Zimbabwean players watched. They watched as every boundary landed like a small death. They watched as their bowlers, men who had trained their whole lives for moments like this, were taken apart piece by piece. They watched, and they knew. They knew what was coming.
Because cricket is cruel like that. Sometimes, the game is over before the second innings even begins.
Akeal Hosein understood this. He is a man who knows that the fastest way to end hope is to strangle it at birth. In the third over of Zimbabwe’s chase, he did something so rare that statisticians had to check their books. A double-wicket maiden. Three balls, two wickets, zero runs. The kind of over that ends careers, let alone matches.
First, Brian Bennett. Zimbabwe’s best batter of the tournament, the man they had pinned their hopes on. Cleaned up. Gone. The sound of middle stump cartwheeling out of the ground was the sound of a thousand dreams collapsing.
Then Ryan Burl. A man who had come to the crease with the weight of a nation on his shoulders. He hit the ball straight to Hetmyer at mid-wicket. The same Hetmyer who had just finished destroying them with the bat was now catching them out. It was cruel. It was poetic. It was cricket.
Twenty for three. Three overs gone. Match over.
But here is the thing about the human spirit. It doesn’t always know when it’s beaten.
Brad Evans walked out when the game was already dead. His team was 147 runs away from a target that had never been chased. The crowd was celebrating. The West Indians were already thinking about the next match. But Evans had not traveled thousands of miles to surrender.
Forty-three runs off twenty-one balls. Five sixes. Two fours. A tenth-wicket partnership of forty-four runs with Richard Ngarava. It meant nothing in the context of the match. The margin of defeat was still 107 runs. But it meant everything in the context of a man’s heart.
Because when you are beaten, when the world has written you off, when the stadium is full of people cheering for the other side, you have a choice. You can fold. You can go through the motions. Or you can swing.
Evans swung.
And somewhere in Zimbabwe tonight, a child will watch the highlights. They will see the sixes. They will see the defeat. But they will also see a man who refused to stop fighting. And that might be enough to make them pick up a bat tomorrow.
The West Indies march on. Five straight wins at Wankhede, a streak that began with their title run in 2016. They look invincible. They look like champions.
But in the other dressing room, a team packs their bags. They will fly home tomorrow. They will face questions. They will relive this night a thousand times.
And somewhere in the stands, a Zimbabwean fan sits alone long after the last ball is bowled. He doesn’t move. He just stares at the empty pitch, at the spot where his team’s hopes died in the third over.
Cricket is beautiful. Cricket is brutal. Tonight, it was both.