Men’s national squads of Oman and United Arab Emirates will definitely go in as favourites on paper, when the ACC Western Region T20 tournament gets underway at Al Amerat from Feb 21st – 28th, 2020.
The tournament serves as a pathway event towards qualification for ACC Asia Cup Qualifiers in Malaysia in Sep 2020. The top 2 teams from the 8-nation Western Region tournament will join the top 2 teams from the Eastern Region tournament in Thailand. Oman, Qatar, Maldives and Bahrain are placed in one group, while the other group consists of United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. All countries will play each other in a single round-robin group stage format, before the top two teams advance to the semi-final stage of the tournament.
The tournament will provide the Associate members in the region to play competitive cricket with the two regional Associate heavyweights in Oman and UAE. The previous Western Region T20 held in Oman in Jan 2019 was a standalone event and did not feature both the countries, which Saudi Arabia went onto win after winning against Qatar in the final.
Both Oman and UAE met each other in Jan 2020 during the 4th round of CWC League 2 ODI Championship at Al Amerat but the T20 format will be a lot closer to call with both countries looking for valuable ranking points to climb up the ICC Men’s T20I team rankings table. Their previous T20 meeting was during ICC Men’s T20 World Cup Qualifiers in Oct 2019 in UAE. Oman, however will miss the services of in-form Aqib Ilyas, who fractured his finger during practice and will miss the entire tournament. He has been replaced by Wasim Ali, who has captained Oman U19 squad in age-group tournaments.
Oman Squad
Zeeshan Maqsood (Captain), Wasim Ali, Jatinder Singh, Khawar Ali, Sanuth Ebrahim, Suraj Kumar, Muhammed Naseem, Sandeep Goud, Muhammed Nadeem, Sufyan Mahmood, Amir Kaleem, Kaleemullah and Bilal Khan
UAE Squad
Ahmed Raza (Captain), Rohan Mustafa, Ansh Tandon, Chirag Suri, Alishan Sharafu, Sultan Ahmad, Junaid Siddique, Muhammad Usman, Basil Hameed, Vriitya Aravind, Muhammad Ayaz, Waheed Ahmed, Karthik Meiyappan and Zahoor Khan
