Davison hands out lesson in classic Caribbean batting

Sure the West Indies were always going to be a tad too strong for Canada in this Pool B group game at SuperSport Park today and they won by seven wickets.

Yet the real event of this World Cup 2003 game was when Davison, with a previous top score of 31 and an average of 13, fashioned the fastest century in the tournament’s 28-year history. It was the sort of remarkable event needed to shake even the normal carefree spirit of the West Indians.

His century came off 67 balls with seven fours and six sixes. It was an innings — he fell at 111 — which created an incredible moment in the daily world of the amateur.

He was involved in a partnership of 96 for the first wicket which had the Windies bowlers ducking and diving and the fieldsmen fumbling. They paid the penalty for dropping him twice: at seven and 35.

Davison may talk about ‘‘honour and glory’’ and say he was ‘‘humble at receiving this award’’, yet it was his stand-up-and-deliver style of batting, taken straight from the pages of Sir Vivian Richards with some touches of Aussie bravado, that meant entertainment for a crowd of 10,500.

It also helped Canada post at least a competitive innings of 202 with Vasbert Drakes collecting 5 for 44. And this was after the first two balls of Drakes’s first over went for 11 runs.

Carl Hooper, wanting to boost the West Indies net run rate, took the gamble of sending the Canadians in on a pitch which is about as good as it is going to get. Davison and fellow opener Ishar Maraj tackled the Test attack and a surge of trepidation wafted through the growing crowd. Mervyn Dillon and Pedro Collins could always perform a hattrick first ball.

Conversely, they could also travel a lot faster than they delivered the ball. The boundary fence, well-lined with the names of the global sponsors, began to feel the pressure as the mid-wicket fence, the long-on and long-off boundaries. That first wicket stand of 96 was scored off only 12 overs, of which Davison’s contribution was seventy-two.

There was a mixture of classic MCC batting manual as well as some of the modern brash Aussie ‘‘whack ’em hard’’ motto. Even Matthew Hayden would have been proud to have been at the other end.

Lara’s batting this World Cup has blown hot and cold and at times produces the sort of precision which leaves any bowler worth his league status in serious disarray and an average looking more like the overdraft figures of a company facing bankruptcy. It was that sort of bowling. Davison, meanwhile, was facing a Test attack and flayed it as if it was a Sunday Park League attack, and that is the difference.