A COUPLE of hours of sensational batting have transformed Dwayne Smith from a cricketing non-entity to an overnight star.
"Dwayne Smith put some pride back into West Indies cricket with a storming 93-ball hundred," Austin Peters wrote in yesterday's London Daily Telegraph of the Barbadian's unbeaten 105 that enabled the West Indies to draw the third Test here Tuesday and break their sequence of seven successive defeats in South Africa..
"Quite apart from the ebullience and fearlessness, his feat was rare enough not to have been achieved by a West Indies batsman on debut for 26 years," Peters added.
Basil Williams' 100 against Australia at Bourda in 1978 was the last occasion a West Indian first-timer has so marked his first appearance in Test cricket. In the The Times of London, veteran writer Pat Gibson also referred to the positive effect of Smith's innings.
"There have been many heroic, match-saving performances in the history of Test cricket but no one has done it like Dwayne Smith did," he wrote.
"It was not enough to enable West Indies to win the third Test against South Africa, but it did restore some pride to a side whose cricket staggers drunkenly from the ridiculously poor to the sublimely brilliant," Gibson added.
Writing in the The Star of Johannesburg, Michael Owen-Smith noted that South African captain Graeme Smith "ran into trouble where he least expected it as his 20-year-old namesake put both the magic and the Caribbean beat back into West Indies cricket".
Owen-Smith said the West Indian Smith had displayed "a flair and a natural striking ability reminiscent of Collis King".
"When he was operating at full steam, it looked as though the West Indies could pull off an improbable victory as they needed 131 off the final 20 overs with five wickets in hand," he added.
Captain Brian Lara explained afterwards that "a draw had to be our only option" after he and vice-captain Ramnaresh Sarwan were dismissed within 21 runs of each other after a partnership of 156.