Namibia causes huge upset to beat Sri Lanka at T20 WCup
GEELONG, Australia (AP) — Namibia has beaten former champions Sri Lanka in a huge upset on the opening day of the qualifying tournament for the Twenty20 World Cup.
The African nation secured a 55-run win over Sri Lanka after the 2014 champions won the toss and elected to field.
In the second game of the day, the Netherlands topped United Arab Emirates by three wickets.
After Jan Frylinck and J.J. Smit’s seventh-wicket heroics batted them back into the match, Namibia defended its 163-7 with great bowling and fielding to dismiss Sri Lanka for 108 runs from 19 overs.
The win puts Namibia in the box seat to progress through the qualifiers and reach the Super 12 stage of the tournament, while Sri Lanka must now beat UAE and the Netherlands in its group.
Sri Lanka sustained a blow in the morning of the game as promising left-arm quick Dilshan Madushanka was ruled out of the competition with a torn quad muscle. He has been replaced by fellow left-arm quick Binura Fernando, who will fly out from Colombo on Sunday night.
Victoria state has the largest Sri Lankan population outside the country and they turned up in numbers to support the team, bringing along with them a papare band – a three-piece group — to perform native songs.
Sri Lanka now needs to win the remaining two games and hope bad weather doesn’t wash out any of their encounters. Four teams from two qualifying groups this week will qualify for the main tournament.
Despite the defeat, Sri Lanka captain Dasun Shanaka remained hopeful.
“If you see in the Asia Cup, we had a similar start. We lost badly to Afghanistan and then we raised our game and hopefully we can get inspiration from that,” Shanaka said.
It was Namibia’s first win against Sri Lanka in any format of the game and captain Gerhard Erasmus attributed the early success to the team's preparation.
“We have been playing against teams like Zimbabwe in the lead up to World Cup and I guess that experience stood in good stead,” Erasmus said.
Later, the Netherlands beat the United Arab Emirates in a last-over thriller with the Dutch winning by three wickets with a ball to spare.
After the Netherlands restricted UAE to 111-8, they were expected to win without much trouble.
However, fast bowler Junaid Siddique had other ideas and claimed three wickets to trouble the Dutch, who at one point slipped to 76-6.
But captain Scott Edwards stayed until the end to see the Dutch through.
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