For a team that is yet to win a match in a world cup, it is a delight to win even a single game, be it against any opposition. This is regarding the way Scotland beat Canada in the second one day match held at Aberdeen. After losing the first one day match to Canada a couple of days back, it looked as though the Scottish players have taken the game of cricket damn seriously. If one goes back to the past of the Scotland's performance in international cricket, they are one of the team who are yet to win a match in ICC world cup or the Champions Trophy.
Scotland got a chance to make it to the world cup in 1999 and 2007, where they lost 5 games in 1999 followed by 3 in 2007. They should have won the games against Holland in the 2007 world cup at Caribbean and against Bangladesh in 1999 world cup. Of course, Bangladesh were a better bunch of playing XI in 1999 when it comes to playing Scotland. Not only did Scotland win the second one day match against Canada, but in addition to that, they chased down a decent total (as far as the standard of cricket in Scotland goes) of 250 with 5 wickets in hand.
Unlike last time where Canada won the toss and showed some mature thinking when they could read the batsmen friendly nature of the pitch and chose to field, this time Canada once again won the toss, but made a bad call when they went in to bat first thus allowing the Scottish batsmen to cut loose. This shows the lack of consistence not only in winning matches but even in making the right call after winning the toss. Despite the first over wicket in the Scottish innings when Watts was run out without facing a delivery, there were 3 other Scottish batsmen who posted half centuries.
As usual, the Canadian captain Ashish Bagai bought on all eight of his bowlers to bowl. Fun was that only one bowler out of eight was found bowling out his quota of 10 overs. Something strange was that there was an over that contained just five deliveries. The second over bowled by Evans in the first innings contained. And one more thing that is rare with the Scottish players was a hattrick ball in the 42nd over bowled by Baidwan which unfortunately couldn't be a hattrick. When such things happen, it raises a question that even the umpires were new to the game. This can be evident from the fact that one of the umpires viz. Enamul Haque was from Bangladesh and the other was a South African in Jerling. But, wasn't there any man of the match?
No comments:
Post a Comment