Method to West Indies’ six, six, six, six madness

“IT WAS about getting bat on ball and focusing on the five-and-a-half ounces of leather coming at me. Thankfully, made contact, four out of four, and West Indies are world champions.”

Carlos Brathwaite makes it sound very simple. On Sunday at Eden Gardens, he made it look very simple.

Just over 12 hours have passed since the relatively unknown Bajan produced the most brutal and jaw-dropping finishes in cricket history.

On Monday morning, Brathwaite is soaking in the euphoria around him outside the Victoria Memorial, decked smartly in his West Indies travel shirt and his sleep-deprived eyes smartly hidden behind dark shades.

Then, in an exclusive chat with The Indian Express, the 27-year-old goes on to break down the anatomy of the heist he just pulled off, and the four deliveries that the whole world is talking about.

Before Ben Stokes commenced the last over of the World T20 final, Brathwaite had a brief conference with Marlon Samuels in the middle.

“Get bat on ball, and as soon as we make contact, we running,” Samuels told his junior partner.

In Brathwaite’s mind, though, the plan was pretty clear. He needed to ‘swing for the hills’. But it wasn’t about manic hitting.

It wasn’t about blindly swinging his bat. It was as much about awareness as it was about brute force, of which there is no shortage in the titanic all-rounder.

So when Ben Stokes missed his line and pitched a full-length delivery on his pads, Brathwaite didn’t just play a little pick-up shot out of pure instinct.

There was a strong reason behind it. “I was trying to get away from hitting towards the bigger side, which would be square-leg, mid-wicket, thankfully it went just over fine-leg,” he reveals.

Already, he’d sent Stokes’ head into a vortex of negative thoughts but Brathwaite was just focused on getting his thoughts together and keeping his eyes on the ball. We’ll leave the descriptions of the second and third six to him.

“The second one was a good one. I had to get a little under it. I had to dip a bit as well. But I knew once it came off the middle it would go. The third one was over long-off. Even fuller. It was kind of a mishit over long-off. But when I looked up I saw that it was well on its way over the boundary, happy days,” says Brathwaite.

As the third one soared into the stands, Stokes was on his haunches, Samuels was launching himself into a mighty embrace with Brathwaite, and Denesh Ramdin-slated to come in next-thought the match was over and ran onto the field.

West Indies were T20 champions again. They just needed a single to let all hell break loose and for the Champion party to commence. But Brathwaite hadn’t lost focus yet.

“After the third one, I knew we were world champions. Only needed the one run off three balls and even if I swung and got out, there was someone else that would take us home. In our dressing-room we always talk about responsibility. So I made sure that I was the man in the end,” he says.

So he promptly launched another six over deep mid-wicket before letting out a mighty roar to signal the return of West Indies at the top of the T20 pile.

Before the violence, though, came the cuteness. With one ball to go in the 18th over, West Indies were still 31 away and desperately needed a boundary.

And Brathwaite, for all his bulging muscles, played a delectable ramp shot with the ball flying over the wicket-keeper’s head for four.

It was a shot, Brathwaite admits now, which his teammates would tease him about while he practiced it relentlessly in the nets.

“Some of the guys advised me not to because I’m a strong guy. But I needed a little versatility,” he says with a smile. It was also a timely boundary with Samuels tiring at the other end. “I knew I needed to get a boundary to get the pressure off Marlon. He told me he wanted to take a majority of the strike from the other end,” adds Brathwaite.

While his blitz at the end might have overshadowed every other event in a truly outstanding final, the West Indies wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the target without Samuels holding the reins.

And Brathwaite doesn’t just rave about the contribution that the Jamaican-who’s the only cricketer to have won man-of-the-match awards in two world event finals-had made to their partnership but also the mentor role he’s played in his life.

“Marlon backed me a lot when many didn’t. He got me in the CPL. Marlon is a very passionate guy. Sometimes it can come across as too cool for school.

That’s his personality. He proved that his ‘too cool for school’ attitude comes trumps in big games,” he says.

Stunning bowling display
In a way, Brathwaite’s batting exploits also dwarfed his stunning bowling display from earlier in the match, where he took three English wickets, each at crucial junctures, including Joe Root and Jos Buttler, while conceding only 23 runs.

“Me and my girlfriend were chatting before we left the hotel and I said I can’t go through the whole World Cup, play all the games and take one wicket. I kind of stuck to my guns and to my strengths a little more than I did in previous games and thankfully it worked out,” he reveals.

When Brathwaite smashed the fourth six, the Eden Gardens was divided in the middle by extreme emotion.

On one side, the West Indians had already gotten the carnival going while on the other stood a bunch of shell-shocked Englishmen, an inconsolable Stokes on his haunches near the pitch, who just couldn’t fathom what just hit them.

In the middle stood Brathwaite beating his chest and looking at the heavens, ‘giving thanks’. And it was only then that he joined the rest of his teammates, most of who just kept leaping on top of his massive frame.

“I just wanted to get that two seconds for myself and just enjoy the moment. I had the whole night to spend it with the team, spend it with my girlfriend. That was just me thanking God for giving me the strength and the ability and the real power to bring it over the line,” he says.

Brathwaite knows about being grateful in life. Five years ago, his life was sent into a whirl when his mother, Joycelyn was diagnosed with breast cancer. But he came through it by learning to look only at the positive and completely ignore the negative.

“I prefer to look at my mum beat cancer as opposed to seeing her having cancer,” he says. That’s how he looked at the 19-run challenge in front of him at Kolkata, and conquered it too.

And he then ensured that his family wasn’t kept out of the celebrations even though they were back home in Barbados.

“I posted a couple of videos on Instagram. I got a couple of messages from my little sister, who’s a social-media fanatic. I FaceTimed the family while I was in the dressing-room while the celebrations were going on. I wanted them to be a part of it,” he says.

Brathwaite was the relative outsider when the tournament began, as the rest of the world focused on the array of T20 scions that he shared the West Indies dressing-room with. It took him four balls and four of the mightiest sixes you’ll ever see to get the whole world talking about him.

But you ask him the morning after whether it has sunk in, and he just shakes his head and says, “I don’t think I still understand the magnitude of what I did.”