S53 Mid-Season Review
Busy irl period just passed and finished, and naturally a lot has happened in UAE land too so let's get straight in to it!
Tours
The OD was played in Week 5 with us Div 1, and that saw us finish 2-3 but with the best NRR compared to Aus and NZ so we survived. Win of the week was vs Sri Lanka where we put up 122 but the bowling was sublime to take all 10 wickets with 16 runs up our sleeve. Al Capone scored our only century of the week, whilst Hud Sam took 9 wickets
Because of the Aussies relegating, this left UAE at that moment as the only nation who were in Div 1 for all formats across seniors and youths. An amazing effort
However it was short lived because in the week just passed we had the T20 tour and sadly our 2-3 record was not enough to keep us up this time. Poor results on Day 1 and Day 5 where we were batted out of the game by India and England. Day 2 saw a nervy win against Australia and Day 3 was a more comfortable win vs Canada as our bowlers really turned the screws well. Day 4 was the sad point as a last ball 3 saw the Netherlands sneak home on a Slow. An impressive week by England who were the lowest rating side on average MR across the week and they went on to win the tour
Al Capone again topped our runs tally for the week, but the shoutouts go to Kaseem Sharif and Abu Reda who both played big innings against Australia and Netherlands, really showing off their spin spec talents
So it'll be Div 2 for the T20 tour next season but in the meantime we have a T20 WC to prepare for. It's been good to battle against the top teams and I look forward to tackling them all again in the WC in 7 weeks time.
The Squad
Changes have occurred as we predicted with all the old lads beginning to plop, so since the last up we have said goodbye to:
Ziyad Khoury: 21 total caps and 24 wickets for us. More impressively though is through his 14 NOD matches he had an economy rate of 3.05, bowling 17 maidens from 14 matches.
No player in UAE history with 7+ matches has a lower economy rate (6th all time). The only thing stopping it from being 4+ matches is....
Khayri Nasri: 6 NOD matches for this medium AR, scoring 89 runs with the bat @ 17.80, and took 12 wickets with the ball at an impressive econ of 2.99
Kaden Musa: 9 caps (5/4) with averages of 13.8 and 17.75 in each format for this batsman.
In the side we can welcome:
Ya'qub Shareef: A wicket-keeper who will be utilised as a batsman for the time being
Sheik Yerbooty: A fast bowler with a deadly yorker.
Jabir Shakur: A med AR who has many change-ups when the ball is older.
There may be more in the coming weeks as we prep for the next tour, there's 3 players who are 31yo who all have some question marks over them.
The friendly matches below saw debuts for Isra'il Hakim and Quinten Lynch, whilst Lynch and Abbas Hussain made their competitive debuts in the T20 tour.
Friendlies
There were two friendlies before the OD tour occurred where we played India and Australia, both on Hot/uneven. Sadly we went down to both. Between the OD and T20 tour we played 5 T20 matches against the 5 nations who I handpicked as the best 5 not in Div 1. Results went as follows:
Scotland - 65 run win
New Zealand - 5 wicket loss
Sri Lanka - 7 wicket win
West Indies - 6 wicket win
USA - 9 run win
Between now and the OD tour we will continue our prep for the T20 WC as we play the 5 teams from our recently completed T20 Division in random/random conditions, beginning with India on Saturday at 16:00.
Week 9
- Select a tour squad for the final OD tour of the season
- Play friendly matches with an eye on the T20 WC.
Go the UAE!
PowerBug