Winless Maldives sign-off tourney with a 35 runs lost against Saudi. Combined batting and bowling effort helped Saudi to trash Maldives in their last league match.
Batting first, Saudi posted decent total of 154 runs on board. They expensed stipulated 120 balls and 6 wickets to do so. Faisal Khan (24), Sajid Cheema (16), Abdul Waheed (18) and Mohammad Afzal (23) batted beautifully and set a stable foundation. In the end, unbeaten 21 ball-38 runs from Shahbaz Rasheed and 7 ball-16 runs from Imran Arif propelled Saudi’s total to 154 runs. Rasheed smashed a four and 3 sixes in his match defining inning. For Maldives, Cooray and Hamid picked up 2 wickets each followed by a wicket each for Saafee and Farhath.
In response of 155 runs target presented by Saudi, Maldives found themselves 35 runs short of target. Despite of Cooray’s sensible batting, rest batsmen failed to provide him a company which resulted batting collapse to suffer a huge defeat. Cooray scored 47 runs from 42 balls with the help of 5 fours. Maldives lost 9 wickets and scored 119 runs in 20 overs of play. Mohammad Afzal hold on with 3 wickets, expensing just 18 runs in his 4 overs of bowling spell. His bowling duo, Imran Arif also bagged 3 wickets.
With this victory, Saudi collected 6 points from 5 matches with 3 victories and placed themselves in 3rd position. They will face Kuwait tomorrow for 3rd place play-off, Kuwait is placed in 4th position with 4 points, registering 2 wins. Finalist, UAE and Qatar already confirmed their place in main draw of Asia’s qualification for World T20. Winner between Kuwait and Saudi will fulfilled required 3 teams quota for Asia’s qualification. Winless Maldives and Bahrain are placed in 6th and 5th place respectively to race out of the qualification.
