It was the batting approach that defined the most successful men's T20 international side of the last decade: why worry about minimising dot balls when you can hit more sixes than the opposition? West Indies embraced that volatile, high-risk, high-reward strategy on their way to winning the 2012 and 2016 World Cups but it has faltered so far in the UAE: lose to Bangladesh on Friday and they will effectively be knocked out less than a week after their title defence began.
But West Indies have natural successors as the poster boys for their focus on six-hitting. In the five-and-a-half years between men's T20 World Cups, Afghanistan were by far the closest team to West Indies in terms of balls per six, dot-ball percentage, and ratio between fours and sixes. They have adopted a similar gameplan: packing their batting line-up with power-hitters rather than strike-rotators, and accepting that occasional low scores were worth the trade-off. "Boundary-hitting and outscoring the opposition in terms of boundaries is very important to your chances of success in T20," Andy Flower, their consultant coach, said in the build-up to this tournament.