What a day of cricket it’s been, low scoring thrillers, mid scoring thrillers, and rain, lots of bloody rain!
The day started with South Africa Vs Nepal. South Africa battered first and looked customarily sub-par on a flat Kensington wicket. Struggling to pick line and length the only batter to show his colours was Proteas opener Reeza Hendricks with 43 off 49 balls, helping SA drag themselves to 115.
Nepal, easily my new favourite team, struggled in Jamaica as well. It has to be said that the gap between these 2 teams is huge, SA should have won this one comfortably. The Gurkhas came within 1 ball of claiming an absolute stonker of a victory, finishing their batting innings on 114. This game was just for pride as SA are through and Nepal were already out but it was a cracker.
My prediction for SA winning the whole thing is still on!
The second early game between New Zealand and Uganda was another dead rubber, both teams having been knocked out already. This was a curious one, Uganda Battered first and only scored 40……….but they took 18.4 over to do it, 18.4! That’s a strike rate of 2.14, prodigiously slow!
The black caps had that knocked of in short order but it was all too little too late for NZ after a couple of tower defeats earlier in the group stage, no need to dwell too much on this one.
The early afternoon game between India and Pakistan was yet another victim of the Florida rain. Yeah, let’s hold a cricket tournament during hurricane season, top plan!
Nothing would have been decided from this game, India are through and Canada aren’t, nothing that happened today would have changed that. There is always the glorious chance of a giant killing lost though.
The last match of the day was a showdown between reining T20 word champs England and south west African supremos Namibia. This was a must win game for England. In order to qualify for the super 8’s we needed to beat the Eagles and then Australia beat Scotland in tomorrow’s night shift fixture. Obviously we have no control over the SCT AUS game so all England could do was win today.
I turned the tele on 15 minutes before the start of play and it was bucketing down in Antigua, apocalypse style rain! If the game was rained off then we would get just the 1 point and Scotland would qualify ahead of us without a ball being bowled. This stress drove the All The Cricket team to stronger drink!
The hours rolled by with pitch inspection after pitch inspection and hope felt like it was slipping away. At half past 8, two and a half hours after the match was meant to start it was announced play would get underway at 9pm in a shortened game……..there was hope!
England battered first and Namibia’s solid bowling attack went to work, restricting England in the opening overs and getting Salt and Butler out for nothing scores. As ever, Yorkshire came to Englands rescue and with a 70 run partnership Jonny Bairstow and Harry Brook steadied the ship and steered England to a competitive 122 in 10 overs.
Namibia in reply never really got going and despite a spirit innings from Namibian legend David Wiese, the Eagles finished 40 runs short of the target.
David Wiese announced today that this was his last international game. All The Cricket wishes the best of luck to him and we hope to see him playing franchise cricket for a few more years to come……….master!
So that’s it, England are currently second in the group and have done all they can do. If Australia beat Scotland, we’re through. If the Scot’s manage a famous victory, or Australia cheat, then Scotland qualify ahead of us. The games starts 1.30am GMT so we will wake up to our fate. For 1 night only, we’re Australia fans!
All the best,
Nick
All The Cricket 
Leave a comment