Glenn Phillips needed only a split second. One step, one adjustment, one outstretched hand – and one of the catches of the Caribbean Premier League lit up a rain-battered night.
Trinidad & Tobago Knight Riders were already under pressure in their DLS chase against Guyana Amazon Warriors when Sunil Narine tried to muscle them forward. He lasted two balls.
Dwaine Pretorius banged one in short, Narine swivelled and pulled hard, flat, towards the leg side. It looked, for a heartbeat, like the kind of stroke that usually races away in T20. Instead, it turned into a postcard for fielding coaches.
Out at deep square leg, Phillips took off to his right. For a moment he seemed to lose the ball against the lights as it fizzed through the Caribbean night. Then came the correction: a sharp deceleration, a twist of the body, and his right arm shooting out at full stretch. The ball stuck in one hand as if pulled in by magnet.
He slid, he stopped, and then he laughed – a disbelieving, cheeky grin that said he could barely believe it himself. Narine was gone for 1 off 2, and TKR’s chase, already wobbling, lurched again.
Hetmyer’s hundred after the storm
The spectacle of Phillips’ grab belonged to the chase, but the platform for Guyana’s nine-run win had been built much earlier, on a surface and an evening repeatedly interrupted by rain.
Guyana Amazon Warriors lost two wickets in the powerplay and then the skies opened. More than 90 minutes disappeared to the weather, threatening to strangle the contest. When play resumed, Shimron Hetmyer decided the game would not drift.
He launched into one of the most ruthless hundreds of this CPL season. Clean hitting, yes, but not reckless. Hetmyer picked his bowlers, picked his areas, and dismantled the shortened innings with a calculated fury. His second CPL century came from just 40 balls, a blur of power and placement that dragged Guyana from uncertainty to dominance.
Romario Shepherd added the late sting, a brisk cameo that ensured the Warriors did not waste Hetmyer’s platform. From their reduced allotment of 16 overs, they surged to 185/5, a total that looked imposing given the stop-start nature of the night.
The DLS method reset the target to 182 for TKR, and with it came a clear message: attack from ball one or go quietly.
Pooran counterattacks, Nabi shuts the door
Colin Munro tried to set the tone, threading a few early boundaries to keep the equation within reach. Narine’s cheap dismissal, though, tightened the grip Guyana had on the game.
Nicholas Pooran responded the only way he knows. He counterpunched.
Suddenly the ball was flying. Pooran’s aggression jolted the chase to life, TKR surging to 50 inside the fifth over. The run rate looked healthy, the mood had shifted, and Guyana needed a response.
Mohammad Nabi provided it with cold precision.
The veteran off-spinner ripped through the middle order, prising out three crucial wickets and, with them, the heart of TKR’s resistance. His spell included the prize scalp of Pooran, the wicket that swung the contest back decisively towards Guyana just as the Knight Riders were threatening to storm ahead.
When Imran Tahir trapped Justin Greaves lbw, TKR slumped to 68/5 in the eighth over. The chase, so vibrant a few overs earlier, now hung by a thread.
Hales fights back, but Guyana hold firm
Alex Hales and Akeal Hosein refused to surrender. With the required rate climbing and the pressure unrelenting, they stitched together a 43-run stand for the sixth wicket that kept the contest alive.
Hales in particular found a rhythm that had eluded him earlier in the season. He drove and pulled with authority, threading gaps and clearing the field to raise his first fifty of the campaign from just 23 balls. For a brief window, the equation no longer looked impossible.
Joshua Da Silva joined the late scramble, adding three boundaries that chipped away at the margin and forced Guyana to stay switched on to the final overs. The scoreboard tightened, the tension rose, but the Warriors never quite relinquished control.
They managed the death overs smartly, protected the big boundaries, and held their nerve to close out a nine-run victory – a result that owed as much to Hetmyer’s brutal hundred and Nabi’s timely burst as it did to Phillips’ moment of airborne genius.
On a night dominated by rain, interruptions and shifting targets, it was that one-handed catch at deep square leg that will live longest in the memory – the kind of play that can tilt a tournament, and remind everyone how thin the line is between a boundary and a turning point.
