With their sights firmly set on securing a spot in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, scheduled to be held in Australia in October and November this year, the stars of the Bahrain cricket team head to Oman on Friday to participate in the global qualifiers for the upcoming tournament.
A squad ‘capping’ ceremony is set to be held tomorrow during which the playing kits will be unveiled, the Bahrain Cricket Federation (BCF) vice president, Manaf Al Mannai, said. The squad will also be announced on the occasion.
The team will be leaving for Oman the following night to prepare for the competition with friendlies against Nepal and the Philippines.
Al Mannai said he is confident that the kingdom’s national team, coached by highly-respected Aashish Kapoor, is capable of reaching the final of, if not winning, the qualifying tournament outright. The top two teams in the tournament will both advance to the main event later this year.
“We’ve been doing consistently well and we’ve reached that level where we can see the game getting a huge boost in the country,” he added. “The team has been winning and there is a certain synergy to our process now. In the lead-up to the qualifiers, we’ve reflected a bit on our team and re-evaluated our selections; new combinations have been tried and new players have been introduced.”
Kapoor is a former Indian cricketer who played in four Test matches and 17 One Day Internationals from 1994 to 2000. A right-arm off-spinner and right-handed lower-order batsman, he was a member of the 1996 Cricket World Cup squad.
Led by captain Sarfraz Ali, Bahrain has been slotted in Group B of the eight-team tournament, along with Germany, Ireland and the UAE. Al Mannai believes that this could work in Bahrain’s favour.
“We have shown how well we can compete,” he said. “Cricket is a team sport and, when the players gel together, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.”
Bahrain face off against Germany in their first match on February 18, before encountering highly-rated Ireland, who recently tied a T20 series 1-1 against the West Indies in the Caribbean and then went on to defeat the former ODI and T20 world champions 2-1 in the 50-over international format.
“We’ve been the underdogs before,” Al Mannai said, in reference to the threat that the Ireland team poses. “But we’ve proved before that we can compete with the best. Anything’s possible in sport and I do believe we can beat them.”
The kingdom’s team will finally take on the UAE on February 21 in their last group match.
Should they make it into the qualifiers’ final, and, thus, gain entry into the T20 World Cup proper, the occasion will mark the culmination of a meteoric rise by the Bahrain team which benefited, along with other International Cricket Council (ICC) associate members, when the ICC decided, in 2018, to grant Twenty20 international (T20I) status to all its members.
Bahrain’s debut T20I game, in January 2019, turned into a celebration when they beat neighbouring Saudi Arabia comfortably in Muscat – at the same ground where they will play their global qualifier matches in a couple of weeks.
And, in late 2021, at the T20 World Cup Qualifier Asia A, Bahrain beat hosts Qatar, The Maldives and Saudi Arabia to top their group, pipping Qatar on superior run rate when the two teams finished level on points. Bahrain’s only loss in that tournament was to Kuwait.
With the level of interest in the upcoming tournament rising among the kingdom’s population, there are many who hope that the Bahrain team, a collection of amateur players with expatriate roots, who are only able to practise on the weekends, can emulate the giant-killing performances of the Zimbabwe team in the 1983 ODI World Cup in England, if they make it into the main event.
Then an associate member team, populated by weekend cricketers, Zimbabwe defeated heavyweights Australia by 13 runs in a stunning upset and nearly knocked India over before a Kapil Dev classic – he made 175 not out – saved the eventual winners of that tournament from an embarrassing loss.
Al Mannai thinks that the current Bahrain team can perform the same giant-killing act – at least, initially, in the global qualifiers – and points to a proposed campaign that aims to help generate more interest in cricket amongst the Bahraini population.
“Literally right after this tournament, we’re going to launch a massive campaign that will hopefully draw in more young Bahrainis, boost the game’s popularity and involve as many schools as possible in our activities,” he added.
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