A stunning century of 122 from Towhid Hridoy and Afif Hossain’s 5/43 with ball along-with a half century helped Bangladesh overcome desperate Canada’s challenge by 66 runs in their Group C match of the 16-team ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup at Bert Sutcliffe Oval, Lincoln in New Zealand on Monday.
With this victory, the future stars of Bangladesh cricket confirmed a seat for the last-eight battles as the 1st side with one game to spare, starting the group campaign with a 87-run victory against Namibia in one of the opening day’s matches at the same venue on Saturday last.
Having restricted Bangladesh to 264/8 in 50 overs at the halfway stage of the match, Canada appeared well in the game but they were left to rue a middle-overs crawl which saw the required rate spiral, and they were unable to catch up in the death overs, finishing on 198/10 in 49.3 overs.
Hridoy’s played an innings of 126 balls for his second international century, which has seen nine boundaries and one six, while man of the match Afif Hossain, who hammered a half century of 84 runs in the first match against Namibia, hit successive half century in the tournament with 50 off 59 balls, including five boundaries and one six.
The big hitters Hridoy-Afif shared a partnership of 111 off 20.4 overs in the 4th wicket stand to carry the team collection to 202/4 in 43 overs before all-rounder Afif was bowled out by Rishiv Joshi, starting from 91/3 in 23.4 overs.
Hridoy continued up to the team’s final collection before he was caught behind by Krishen Samuel off Faisal Jamkhandi.
Opening batsman Mohammad Naim fell short of three runs for a half century as he was caught by Aran Pathmanathan off Rommel Shahzad, scoring 47 off 67 balls with five boundaries, on 91/3 in 23.4 overs, from where Hridoy-Afif started their composures.
Canada won the toss and elected to field first and soon claimed the wicket of opener Pinak Ghosh, who slashed to point on nought.
Faisal Jamkhandi got five wickets for 48 runs in eight overs, while AS Gill, RR Joshi and Rommel Shahzad took one wicket each for 43, 48 and 57 runs for Canada respectively.
On their fruitless target chase, Canadian skipper Arslan Khan hit a half century of 63 off 108 balls, including four boundaries, while opener Pranav Sharma (34 off 58 b; 2×4), K Naress (26* off 29 b; 1×4), K Singh (24 off 24b; 2×4; 1×6), AS Gill(22 off 29b; 1×4) and R Sandhu (11 off 27b; 1×4) were the other double digit scorers for the side.
Afif Hossain bowled with accuracy and guile to handle the half strengths of Canadian batting castle grabbing five wickets for 43 runs in 10 overs, while Hasan Mahmud got two for 23 runs in 8.3 overs. Skipper Saif Hassan, Qazi Onik and Robiul Haque took one wicket each for 7, 39 and 47 runs respectively.
Bangladesh will play their last group match against England at Queenstown Events Centre on Thursday.
