Scotland beat Bangladesh in their first match of T20 World Cup 2021 at Al Amerat Cricket Ground on Sunday.
Bangladesh batters struggled right from the start of thei chase after their bowlers restricted Scotland to 140/9. Mushfiqur Rahim (38) was the top scorer from Bangladesh side but he failed to take his team to the winning line.
Chris Greaves was the star performer in the match, first he got 45 runs with the ball and then he took 2 wickets to guide hua team to glory. Bradley Wheal was the most successful bowler from Scotland as he took 3 wickets and gave away just 24 runs in four overs.
“Credit to the Bangladesh bowlers, they showed high class skills. They did blow us away a bit. But you can’t count any team out in T20s. We had a lot of belief in our batting depth, we do feel we can all hit the ball a long way. Greaves and Watt showed it. It was tricky, there was plenty of dew. I felt our fielders tackled it well apart from myself, all credit to them. It (lower order fightback) just shows that we can win a game from any position. We fought back with some great knocks and this is a great confidence builder. We understand that we have to play extremely well to beat sides. We certainly didn’t play to our full potential tonight against a good Bangladesh side. We’ll do what we do after winning games, and maybe de-brief at some point tomorrow. Huge togetherness amongst our crowd. That’s one of the most important things that we need when we want to get across the line under pressure. Everyone backs each other. Really proud of the guys. We continually keep proving to ourselves that we’re capable,” said Scotland captain Kyle Coetzer.
“I think the wicket was quite good and 140 was gettable. We were missing that one big over in the middle. Bowlers did their job really well but the batting unit weren’t good enough tonight. (If Bangladesh were complacent when Scotland were 53/6) Don’t think so, we were just one wicket away. Credit goes to their batters, they had a good finish. Yeah, when you can’t chase 140, there needs to be a look-in, need to correct the mistakes. We still need to be positive and figure out where we made mistakes, and not try to repeat them. Beautiful wicket to bat on, fantastic ground and crowd, we need to pull our socks up and play better cricket,” said Bangladesh skipper Mahmudullah after the match.
