“We can qualify to the World T20 Cup in 2014.”
If anybody else has told me this, I would have eyed him as someone who has no idea about our cricket. But this was Paras Khadka, the skipper whom anyone keeping an eye on cricket can only praise.
He said so publicly as soon as returning from UAE, when he led the team to an impressive seventh-place finish in the World T20 Cup qualifiers. This time, only two teams qualified but next time, six teams will proceed to the world stage from the qualifiers.
“We finished seventh, a step ahead and we are in,” Paras told the media.
The captain knew, perfectly, that his team has every chance to move a couple of steps. We didn’t prepare for the tournament like we had a chance; we had a coach who is still trying to understand the team and players and most importantly we – the players, officials and fans – had lost confidence in team’s capacity to perform well in Twenty20 version of the sports.
At three appearances in the Asian level Associate/Affiliate event – the ACC T20 Cup, we were just an ordinary team. We won 9 matches and lost 6 matches and until last year in home ground, we failed to reach semifinals. Last year, the team crept into semifinal as unconvincingly as any weak team could and finished with two losses then after.
But the Qualifiers was a different story. We won 5 matches and lost 4 in the competition with best Associate/Affiliate teams from around the world. And, most importantly, we played like a champion team.
And, my reason to praise Paras even more: in our 5 wins in UAE, he was man of the match in three. And, overall in our 14 T20 victories so far, he had held the after-match trophy six times – wow!
But we should also focus on what he said along with those words about qualification to the world stage: “…if we prepare seriously with an aim to qualify…”
Is Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN) listening to one of the best players we ever had and the one who can truly lead from front to bring the long-due honor to us?