There is a lot that an in-form Nicholas Pooran can do. For instance, he can transform at the blink of an eye, a sluggish looking scorecard into a rampaging one.
He can find boundaries when runs seem to dry out and he can, on his own, usher a slow partnership into a rapidly blooming one, relieving the batter at the other end of major run-scoring responsibility.
All it takes Pooran , as one notably saw in the game against PNG, one big over to change the rate at which the southpaw scores and in turn, impacts his team’s fortunes.
A classic case in this case is the way he butchered India’s Ravi Bishnoi and Yuzvendra Chahal in a dominant T20 performance last year in the Caribbean; all Mayers first and later, Hetmyer had to do was to watch the one-man show as Nicholas Pooran reached 67 off mere 40.
But then, the big insight on Nicholas Pooran also happens to be that in some occasions, he takes his own sweet time to get going.
This was also, rather remarkably, evident in his West Indies’s 2024-World cup opener against PNG.
Before he cut loose, much too suddenly, perhaps sensing the need to up the NRR, if so rather belatedly, Nicholas Pooran was on 5 off 15 deliveries.
His opponents could best be described as minnows of world cricket.
Seven in ten die-hard cricket fans are whose top-of-the-mind-cricketing heroes are Virat, Rohit, Bumrah, Warner and company didn’t even know of the existence of bowlers like Nao, Soper and Bau.
But Pooran was struggling against them. What this does, inadvertently, to the team is that it swells up its dot ball consumption. While in the end the West Indies got away with a deserving win, one couldn’t possibly turn away from their real blithe: 54 dot balls in their run chase.
It ought to be said that what the West Indies definitely need at the moment is ‘prime’ Nicholas Pooran, the batsman in form, the one who doesn’t take much time to settle in and gets away briskly.
That’s the batsman of the kinds that a certain revered Ian Bishop noted recently for his visible improvement: “His game awareness, his maturity…!”
Truth be told, Nicholas Pooran will have to find a way to bring in his rich vein of form as seen in the recent IPL into the ongoing World Cup campaign and that too, without much doubt.
What his team need from an experienced campaigner who is no stranger to the changing vagaries of T20 cricket is the kind of batsman who very recently went on a rampage, hitting 6,4 and 6 inside six deliveries of an over having been contained much against his liking.
Even from an individual point of view, Pooran is closing in on some milestones and it would be lovely to see him scale some in the mother of all T20 battles.
For instance, he’s just 125 runs way from 2,000 T20 runs in a West Indian jersey. Should he hit 22 more boundaries, he’d have hit 150 career fours in the shortest format of the game. But beyond the desire for conquering personal milestones, Pooran will have to realise the basic Windies batting philosophy for this tournament.
And it’s that the longer he stays at the wicket, he’ll be (hopefully) successfully enabling the rest of the big hitters- Russell, Rutherford and Shepherd- to come good.
While a Hope may not play every single T20I contest, arguably because someone like a Chase brings more utility thanks to his off spinners, Pooran is that central pivot around which much of West Indian batting is going to revolve.
Having said that, the need for Windies to rise and shine this time round goes beyond the comfort of them playing in at home conditions; they’d love to remember how badly they bundled out in the last two editions of the T20 World Cup. And a rather familiar face was at the helm of leadership affairs back then. His name? Nicholas Pooran. His ambition now? Well, as the great Ian Bishop said, to dominate this T20 World Cup.