Hong Kong broke in pieces against Shane Snater & Roelof van der Merwe, then picked them up via Shahid Wasif & Tanvir Afzal and then got dismissed again by dominant batting display by Netherlands to lose their practice match by 7 wickets in Pretoria, South Africa.
Anshuman Rath (40 off 44) got to a start at the top of the order but got out pretty early as well with wickets falling consistently at both the ends and soon HK were down in the dumps with the scoreboard reading 92/7 in the 30th over.
Shahid Wasif (53 n.o off 74) got involved in two important partnerships to bring respectability to Hong Kong innings as he forged a 62-runs partnership for the 8th wicket with Tanvir Afzal (36 off 45) and an unbeaten 48-runs partnership for the 9th wicket in 32 deliveries with Aizaz Khan (17 n.o off 17) to take HK to 202/8 in their 50 overs.
Shane Snater (3/29) and Roelof van der Merwe (3/19) were the main wreckers-in-chief for Netherlands with Paul van Meekeran and Tim van der Gugten picking up a wicket apiece.
Any chance Hong Kong could have had in the match, if they were to pick up early wickets in their bowling innings, quickly went out of the equation as all the top-order batsmen for Netherlands getting amongst the runs. The opening partnership between Maxwell O’Dowd (33 off 48) and Wesley Barresi yielded 70 runs before Max got out in the 15th over to Ehsan Khan.
Barresi (63 off 81) continued in the company of Ben Cooper to form a 68-runs partnership for the 2nd wicket and when Barresi got out to Nizakat Khan in the 30th over, Netherlands were well in course for their chase with the scoreboard at 138/2. Peter Borren joined Cooper and played a whirlwind knock of 38 runs from 33 deliveries and was the last Dutch wicket to fall in the innings as Cooper (63 n.o off 78) and Roelof van der Merwe took their team past the finish line with Netherlands reaching 205/3 in the 40th over to register a comfortable victory.
Netherlands and Hong Kong each play Scotland once and Hong Kong also have a match-up against Ireland in the pre-WCQ tour to Pretoria for all the four teams before heading to Zimbabwe for World Cup Qualifiers.
