Wakely showers praise on matchwinner White

The Australian made an undefeated 71 as the visitors eased past the hosts who had made a meagre 125-9 from their 20-over allocation.

And the two points collected means that Wakely will lead his side into the knockout stages in just over a week’s time with the only thing to be decided being whether they will play at home or not.

Wakely said: “We targeted the right bowlers and when you’ve got guys who can clear the ropes all the way down it makes it quite easy.

“In the two years we’ve had him that’s probably the best I’ve seen him play. On what was a very tricky pitch, it was a bit two-paced and hard to time the ball and he was so composed.

“He never panics and is always aware that if he can keep it down to seven or eight an over maximum he knows that he can clear the ropes when he needs to.”

And Wakely revealed that the brains trust had done their homework before the game and that was behind the somewhat surprising decision to chase rather than bat first.

He added: “We looked at the stats and 75 per cent of games played down here have been won batting second which in itself was a big enough stat for us.

“We looked at the boundaries which are very big and it was shown that it is very hard to hit boundaries here and if we could restrict them to a decent score we’d have a chance of chasing it down.

“I thought they were probably 20 or 25 under par, they seemed to lose three or four wickets for nothing really.”