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After hitting three sixes in four balls off Sam Curran
to cap off a thrilling victory for his West Indies team over England on Sunday
in Antigua, Shai Hope urged his teammates to improve next week as they aim to
win the series.
Hope scored the fastest century of his career, an
unbeaten 109 off 83 balls, in his 16th ODI. He started it off with a barrage of
sixes to get the West Indies across the finish line. He then went on to secure
a four-wicket victory with seven balls remaining, smashing a Curran full toss
over wide long-on and bringing up three figures with a shorter ball over deep
midwicket.
“A very, very famous person, MS Dhoni – we had a
chat a while ago, and he was saying, ‘You always have a lot more time than you
think,'” Hope said at the post-match presentation. “That’s one thing
that has stuck with me throughout the years I’ve been playing ODI cricket.
Speaking to CWI’s in-house channels, he added:
“The dimensions of the field and then the wind factor there, I thought the
best thing to do was to target that particular over. We knew it was a challenge
to score from the other end, especially going against the breeze… regardless of
what happened, I was going to try and take down that second-to-last over to
give us the best chance of winning the game.
“After the second [six of the 49th over], I knew
we pretty much had the game in the balance. If we had that over to finish the
game, I always try to finish the game with one over to spare if I can. I don’t
want to leave it to anyone else, so the aim was to finish off at the back
end.”