Afghanistan head coach Jonathan Trott has admitted that his side’s massive win over Uganda in their T20 World Cup opener may come in handy later when it comes to progression to the next stage. Afghanistan have New Zealand and hosts West Indies in their group and but their NRR received a big boost following their 125-run win on Monday.
“I think in a tight group with the quality of sides, yes, Net Run Rate may play its part,” Trott said. “I don’t worry too much about the weather and the rain, and that’s up to the cricketing gods. But I think it’s more of a confidence boost the way that we played and finished off the game as well. I think Fazal [Farooqi] played really well, bowled really well, and helped the whole team play really well. So that’s pleasing.”
With the conditions expected to favour Afghanistan in this tournament, they are looked at as genuine semifinal contenders. However, Trott pointed out that their current focus is on toppling New Zealand next. “I think yes a lot of people have spoken us up,” he admitted. “But again you know cricket can change very quickly and we’ve got to take it one game at a time. So the only thing we’re focused on I know it’s very boring, very cliched but is our match against New Zealand who are a very good side so I’m looking forward to that.”
With both their openers firing, Afghanistan were at one stage 154/0 but managed to add only 29 runs from their final 33 deliveries for the loss of five wickets. Trott admitted that finishing the innings against the older ball remains a concern. “I think coming into the tournament and starting on these wickets, especially against a slightly older ball, is a little bit tricky,” he observed. “So we’ve got to get better at that. As was said, we only scored 30-odd in the last six overs. And with the platform we had, we should have done a bit better. We shuffled the order a little bit, and maybe that’s our fault a little bit, as coaches, decision making, mixing the order up a little bit left, right hand. We want to look at that and hopefully get that right next game. There’s always areas to improve.”
Meanwhile, the Uganda skipper Brian Masaba revealed that there is a gulf in quality between Afghanistan and the teams they have encountered so far in their journey. “It’s obviously a much higher level than we regularly play at, so we’ve got to step up our game a long way,” he said. “But Afghanistan are top side, they’ve done really well over the last couple of years, so it’s no surprise they’re playing the way they do but just focusing on ourselves – again it’s an execution thing I know we can play better than we did today. We’ve done it in the past. It’s a small turnaround between now and the next game, so we need to get, we need to get our minds back on track and make sure we come out and execute a bit better in our next game.”
While ruing the fact that his bowlers gave too many boundaries to the Afghanistan openers, Masaba pleased with the way they pulled things back at the death. “There’s a couple of things we’d spoken about that we didn’t do so well,” he noted. “I thought we gave away too many boundaries. And to a side like Afghanistan, you do that and you’re going to get punished. So yeah, I thought we could have bowled a bit better, maybe bowled a bit more to our plans but we didn’t execute that well.
“In a T20 game, very often the game can go very quickly in the last five overs. Especially considering the fact that we are under the pump for most of the innings. So to come back like that and restrict them the way we did, it’s a huge bonus for us. And we’ll look to carry that into our games going forward.”
