By Tony Becca - On The Boundary 
THE CARIB Beer Series is over and congratulations to Barbados on winning the double - and in style at that.
In a dominating performance from start to finish, Barbados won the Cup - the regional section of the series - by the impressive margin of 24 points and then won the International Shield with two easy victories.
The Cup was decided after the round robin involving all eight teams, and with five victories - all coming inside three days, plus two first innings leads, Barbados, champions even before the final round was played, finished on a whopping 72 points and way ahead of second-placed Guyana.
As far as the Cup was concerned therefore, it was like a one-horse race; and it was no different in the hunt for the Shield. In another awesome display, Barbados knocked off Trinidad and Tobago by nine wickets in the semi-finals and Jamaica by seven wickets in the final.
Barbados were the best - no doubt about that, and looking at the scoresheets, they were the best, not only because of the performance of youngsters like pacer Tino Best and batsman Kurt Wilkinson, but also and unlike Jamaica, because their leading players delivered.
With five players - batsmen Christopher Gayle, Wavell Hinds, Marlon Samuels and Ricardo Powell and fast bowler Jermaine Lawson - out of action for most of the time because of the World Cup, Jamaica, winners of the Shield in 2001, winners of the Cup and runners-up in the Shield in 2002, were not expected to win the Cup.
The hope, however, was that they would finish in the top four, and with their big guns back for the semi-finals and final, they would win the Shield.
WENT DOWN WITHOUT A FIGHT
That, however, was not to be, and with Barbados playing so well, the disappointment was not that they did not win after edging out defending champions Guyana in the semi-finals. The disappointment was that they went down without a fight, and with allrounder David Bernard Jnr., batsman Brenton Parchment, and pacer Jerome Taylor performing, not because of their youngsters, but because their big guns did not fire.
Unlike Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Carl Hooper who returned from the World Cup and scored 145 and 109, and 130 not out respectively for Guyana, Brian Lara whose scores included 53 and 152 for Trinidad and Tobago, and Pedro Collins - three for 44 and three for 36, Corey Collymore - five for 65 and five for 44, and Vasbert Drakes - six for 31 and three for 44 - who did so well for Barbados, Jamaica's West Indies players let them down.
In two matches, Gayle scored 21 and two, 19 and 21; in three matches, Hinds scored 0 and 18, 58 and 25, 22 and two; in three matches, Marlon Samuels scored 26 and 32, 79 and five, six and 13; and in two matches, Ricardo Powell scored four and 10, four and zero.
Those figures show that in 20 innings between the team's four batsmen who participated in the World Cup, only twice did they come up with a reasonable score.
Remembering that even the best batsmen can fail - and sometimes for a number of innings, that, however, was not the real disappointment. The real disappointment was the approach of Jamaica's West Indies batsmen to the job of scoring runs - the careless, reckless strokes that suggested it did not matter to them whether they performed or not, whether Jamaica won or not, and which led to their downfall.
