United Arab Emirates became the first of the three qualifiers from ICC Asia “A” qualifiers in Kuwait as the tussle for the 2nd place continued among three other countries with the final round of group matches to take place on 26th Apr 2018.
While host’s Kuwait will have the toughest test on their hands as they go up against UAE in their final group match. A must win match for the host’s if they want to equal Qatar on points but hoping Qatar lose their final match against Bahrain could be a tall order and Qatar can very well finish 2nd on the table.
Another challenger for the 2nd place would be hoping for the same fate for Qatar as Kuwait but also ensure they win their final group match against an ever-improving Maldives, who gave a mighty scare to UAE in today’s game but lack of experience showed for their batsmen, who could not chase down 123
Bahrain still have an outside chance to qualify in the top 4 if they manage to tackle Qatar and will hope that both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia do not find success in their respective matches.
UAE gave debut to Fahad Nawaz, who impressed with the ball as he picked up 2/22 and contributed 8 crucial runs towards the end of UAE’s innings, which was left stunned by the efforts from Ameel Mauroof (3/22), Azyan Farhath (2/15), Nilantha Cooray (2/22) and Moamed Saafee (2/25) for Maldives.
Bahrain gave good fight to Kuwait but went down by 23 runs as they could not reach the target of 154 set by Kuwait. Arjun Makesh with 4/21 did the most of the damage as wickets at crucial junctures of the game took away Bahrain’s chances towards the end of the innings.
The match between Saudi Arabia and Qatar was a lot closer than the scorecard reflects as Qatar edged past them by 4 wickets chasing a target of 136 set by Saudi Arabia. All teams will have a day off to make their plans when they take the field on the final day of group matches, which will decide who takes the 2nd place in the points table and qualifies automatically for the regional finals as teams finishing 3rd and 4th will slug it out in the play-off to decide the final qualifying team from Asia “A” qualifiers into the regional finals, to be held in 2019.
