“Most of our boys have watched the West Indies only on television.” – Monty Desai, Nepal head coach
Telford Vice / Harare
WINTER’S dusk descends hard and fast in Zimbabwe, banishing the day’s warmth and flooding the sudden gloom with an invasive chill in an instant. Even so, the West Indian and Nepalese players took the opportunity to linger in each other’s company on a rapidly darkening outfield after their match in the men’s World Cup qualifiers at Harare Sports Club on Thursday.
Alzarri Joseph, sitting on the turf languidly, held court in one gaggle. In another Jason Holder stood all of his 2.01 metres tall, chatting and smiling and clearly enjoying the moment. Most of the talking was done by the West Indians, most of the listening by the rapt Nepalese.
One of the topics discussed might have been their workload. Including warm-up matches, Thursday’s game was the Windies’ fourth in nine days. They will have played two more by Monday evening. Nepal have been on the park five times in the same nine days, with another match to come on Saturday. Stand by for the Super Sixes, the place play-offs and the final.
The finalists, who will meet at HSC on July 9, will have played 10 matches in 27 days. This year’s IPL champions, Chennai Super Kings, played 16 times in 59 days. If all of those games in both tournaments went down to the last ball, the finalists at the qualifiers would have been on the field for 1,000 overs and CSK for 640. The internationals would have worked 36% harder than the IPL sides in 45.76% of the time it took to complete the latter. Fifteen of the players who featured in the IPL, which ended 21 days before the qualifiers started, are among the 151 in the squads in Zimbabwe.
The 10 teams will play all 34 games in the tournament proper — minus the warm-ups — in the space of 22 days. The same programme was followed in the previous edition of the qualifiers, also in Zimbabwe, in March 2018.
Shai Hope has never played in the IPL, but he’s here. As West Indies’ captain and first-choice wicketkeeper-batter, he has been on the field for 269.5 of the 381.4 overs — more than 70% — his team have spent batting and fielding in the qualifiers. How was he holding up?
“I’m not sure at the moment, I’ll be able to answer that question in the morning,” Hope said after Thursday’s game, in which he batted for 43.3 overs for his 132 and was behind the stumps for Nepal’s innings of 49.4 overs.
“We got some time off after the first game, which was good. But these games are going to come at a much faster turnover, so we’ve got to make sure our recovery is on point and we focus a lot more on how we do things off the field.”
That time off was three days between a game against the United States on Sunday and Thursday’s match. Happily for the Windies, all four of their games have been in Harare — Bulawayo is a 35-minute flight away — as is their showdown with Zimbabwe on Saturday.
Nicholas Pooran hasn’t been as busy as Hope — 237.4 on-field overs, or more than 60% of the total. “This is what we signed up for,” Pooran said after scoring 115 on Thursday. “Unfortunately we have to qualify for the World Cup. It’s a tough road. We need to get some rest tonight, recover tomorrow, and turn up on Saturday.”
Nepal, Oman, Scotland and Ireland will have only one day off between each of their four group games. “I would have preferred one more day of rest inbetween but it is what it is, we just have to get on with it,” Monty Desai, Nepal’s head coach, said on Thursday.
Desai’s team face the Netherlands at Takashinga, also in Harare, on Saturday in what looms as a shootout for third place in group A — and thus for a spot in the Super Sixes. “It’s straightforward: Netherlands or us,” Desai said. “It’s all a mental game now. We’ll get ready mentally and trust our skills.”
Nepal played the first of their 111 white-ball internationals in March 2014. Only eight of them have involved countries that were full members at the time. They have had three games each against Zimbabwe and Ireland and one against Bangladesh. And, on Thursday, West Indies — who followed the stand of 216 Hope and Pooran shared by bouncing out the Nepalese to nail down victory by 101 runs.
Not that you would have thought they had been roughly dealt with as they mingled willingly with the winners on the outfield. Nepal looked like winners themselves, and they were. To get to the qualifiers they had to finish among the top three teams in World Cup League 2, a competition that ran from August 2019 to March this year in which each of the seven teams played 36 matches. Nepal won 19 games to finish behind Scotland and Oman.
“Most of our boys have watched the West Indies only on television,” Desai said. “For them it was a proud moment to play against a Test nation. Maybe the batsmen got distracted by the occasion and the barrage of short balls. But it’s OK. For us it’s a pure learning experience.”
Even in the aftermath of defeat, in the sniping cold and gathering dark of an outfield far from home. Maybe they were tired, but they were also happy.
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