Day 5 of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup Qualifier turned out to be a memorable one once again. The day began with the highly rated Scotland’s loss to Namibia and ended with yet another upset as the hosts UAE went down to Jersey. In between these two matches, the Netherlands maintained their unbeaten run as they notched up a hat-trick of victories.
Scotland vs Namibia
The crowd at Dubai saw a spectacular display of grit, resolve and determination as a small associate side like Namibia took down a highly rated side like Scotland. Namibia, who were coming into this match on the back of consecutive defeats, rode on JJ Smit’s 26-ball knock of 43 to put on a competitive total of 159/6 while batting first on a sluggish track. And the bowlers backed the effort up as they reduced Scotland to 17 for 2 early on in the innings. Scotland could never recover from the early jolts and kept losing wickets at regular intervals. Calum MacLeod tried his best to hang around with his 46-ball knock of 39 runs but it didn’t prove to be enough as Scotland ended up with a score of 135/8 from their 20 overs and, thus, fell short of the target by 24 runs.
Namibia 159/6 (JJ Smit 43, Josh Davey 2/29) beat Scotland 135/8 (Calum MacLeod 39, Jan Frylinck 2/15) by 24 runs.
Netherlands vs Singapore
The result of this match was more along the expected lines. This was the second match of the day at the ICC Academy in Dubai and the pitch had already weared down a lot. And the Dutch bowlers took full advantage of that as their canny variations helped them to bowl Singapore out for a paltry total of 101 runs. All of them chipped in. Roelef van der Merwe and Tim van der Gugten pickied up three wickets each and the likes of Paul van Meekeren and Brandon Glover claimed two wickets a piece. The target wasn’t that far but Netherlands needed to be watchful on a tricky surface. And they approached their innings very carefully as a knock of 35 off 31 deliveries from Max O’Dowd at the top of the order, and an unbeaten knock of 34 runs off 36 deliveries from Colin Ackermann later, set the victory up for them with 21 deliveries and five wickets to spare.
Netherlands 104/5 (Max ODowd 35, Sidhant Singh 1 /5) beat Singapore 101 all out (Surendran Chandramohan 28, Tim van der Gugten 3/9) by five wickets.
UAE vs Jersey
At Abu Dhabi, Jersey came up with another shocker as they defeated the hosts UAE by quite a healthy margin of 35 runs. The hosts looked to be in complete control of the proceedings when they had reduced Jersey to 67/4 by the 11th over of their innings. But it was Benjamin Ward who walked out to bat and turned the game on its head. He played a whirlwind knock of 47 runs off just 24 deliveries and propelled Jersey’s score to 147. UAE in reply were in the hunt until the 12th over of their innings but they lost their way in the middle and ended up losing their last eight wickets for just 38 runs. They were bowled out for just 112 runs in the final over of the innings, thus, allowing Jersey to win by a fine margin.
Jersey 147 all out (Benjamin Ward 47, Junaid Siddique 2/34) beat UAE (Rohan Mustafa 28, Harrison Carlyon 3/15) by 35 runs.