"I have the strength to swing the bat," she added later, eliciting even more raucous behavior from the audience.

"Your captain is ready," she declared, bringing about full-fledged pandemonium.

Then she uttered the word "six," which in cricket is the equivalent of a grand slam home run in baseball, prompting her backers to completely lose control.

The conference room where she spoke took on the rowdy air of Sabina Park, where the Windies beat Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Ireland early in the tournament. Some in the crowd held both hands in the air, three fingers out on each hand, giving a cricket referee's signal for a "six."

Simpson-Miller is hardly the only Jamaican politician to go cricket-crazy.

The late Michael Manley, who served for two periods as prime minister, from 1972 to 1980 and from 1989 to 1992, also representing the People's National Party, set sports records as a schoolboy. And he was the author of "A History of West Indies Cricket," which explored the ties between the game and Caribbean nationalism.

Not to be outdone, Manley's longtime rival, Edward Seaga of the Jamaica Labor Party, who was prime minister from 1980 to 1989, was a boyhood cricket player and member of the Kingston Cricket Club. He recently recounted his love of wicket keeping and his two favorite shots, the pull and the hook.

It was Simpson-Miller's predecessor, P.J. Patterson, who played a crucial role in bringing the World Cup to the Caribbean this year, the first time the islands have been the host of the tournament since it began in 1975. The West Indies won that first cup, incidentally, and managed to win the second one, too.

When Patterson stepped down last year and Simpson-Miller, using the slogan "Come to Mama," beat three male competitors within the ruling party to take the post of prime minister, she inherited the big event.

And she is making the most of it. As the party chairman, Robert Pickersgill, told The Gleaner, Jamaica's principal newspaper, recently, "With the bounce we are now getting from the cricket, the opposition is stumped."

The Gleaner took umbrage at the remark and suggested that politics had better stay off the cricket pitch. "Hosting cricket, we assumed, was a national rather than a partisan matter," the paper said. "Any government that decided to spend upward of $120 million on the event would have done so because they believe it would be good for Jamaica."

That spending has been criticized by Bruce Golding, the leader of the opposition. He has suggested that the money that went to build a new stadium would have been better spent upgrading the hospitals, which lack basic medicines, or supporting the police, who often have no transportation to get to the scene of a crime quickly.

Simpson-Miller's government, however, has argued that the effects of cricket will be long-lasting. There has been some disappointment with ticket sales, and the flood of tourists that had been expected never materialized. But Simpson-Miller notes that the pre-tournament refurbishment that Jamaica received will not go away when the cup is awarded - hopefully to the Windies, of course.

She has not let on when she will call elections, although she is obligated to do so by October. Cricket has clearly been a factor in the scheduling.

The conventional wisdom when she took over in February 2006 was that she would set the date soon to take advantage of her enormous popularity as the island's first female prime minister. But she delayed, and then a financial scandal hit her party when it was discovered that a Dutch-based commodities firm, Trafigura Beheer BV, which does business with the government, had secretly donated nearly a half-million dollars to her campaign.