Asia Cup T20, Match no 8 – Bangladesh vs Nepal.
Bangladesh won the toss & elected to Bat.
Bangladesh Batters came in with only 1 thing in mind, scoring runs! And score they did.
Both the openers Sanjida Islam & Wicketkeeper Batter Nigar Sultana were both scoring quite freely at run a ball. Until the 12th over, when Sanjida Islam gave a return catch to Sangita Rai, but by then the duo had already taken the score to 71.
Bangladesh Women lost another wicket to Sita Magar on 79. But there was no stopping to the Bangladesh scoring.
Shaila & Nigar contributed 24 off 22 balls, till Nigar was picked by Nepal Captain Rubina, & shortly Shaila too, for another return catch to Sangeeta Rai.
Bangladesh had 2 new batters on the pitch. Nepal Women might have thought that this will slow down the scoring, but instead Rumana & Fahima had other ideas. They both together blasted 25 off just 14 balls.
Bangladesh piled up 133 for 4 the highest score of the tournament in the allotted 20 overs.
The Nepal batting showed their inexperience & did not start well. They kept losing wickets on regular intervals. By the end of 8th over Nepal had already lost 5 wickets (3 of which belonged to Fahima Khatun) for just 21 runs.
Nepal lost their Captain with the score on 32 off 13 overs. With Nepal requiring 102 runs of the remaining 7 overs & just 4 wickets remaining, the only target that was probably in front of Nepal was to play out the 20 overs, which would have helped them mentally.
But Except Sita Magar, who scored a 15 of 14 balls (3×4) all the batters got out in single digit score and Nepal winded their innings in the 18th over on a score of 41.
Bangladesh won the match by a massive 92 runs, which helped them reach the 2nd position replacing Pakistan on the points table due to better run rate. Bangladesh had rested their senior players Salma Khatun, Khadija Tul Kubra and Ritu Moni. Their next match is against Pakistan, the winner of the match will take the 2nd position. The match sure is well poised.
