Region No 3 (Kathmandu) and Region No 4 (Bhairahawa) registered victories on the opening day of the Wai Wai U-19 National Cricket Tournament on Tuesday.
Riding on captain Gyanendra Malla’s unbeaten 48, Kathmandu defeated Region No 1 (Biratnagar) by six wickets at the TU Cricket Ground while Lal Bahadur Adhikari’s all-round performance gave Bhairahawa a 29-run victory over Region No 2 (Birgunj) at the BSAM Ground.
At BSAM, Antim Thapa won the toss and elected to bat first. Sanjay Nepal went on early but Subash Pradhan and Antim carried on the innings with run-a-ball 42-run partnership. Subash (34 off 38 balls) fell to left-arm seamer Avinash Karn while Antim (17 off 24) ran himself out.
Lower-order batsmen made handy contributions with Lal making 37 and Rahul BK scoring 31 in the best partnership of the innings that produced 69 runs for eighth wicket. Akash Gupta got 18 and Sagar Khadka made 18 as the innings folded up in 46 overs with 184 runs on board.
Avinash, Bibek Dali, Kumar Thapa and Dipendra Kumar Raut each walked away with two wickets.
Birgunj’s innings began well with Sumit Shrestha and captain Akash Pariyar giving a solid partnership of 38 runs in 11 overs. Lal started with Sumit, who scored 28 off 32 balls, and got Hasim Ansari (4) quickly to make it 43/2.
Akash (12 off 61) fell to Sagar as Birgunj batsmen struggled to score runs. Sagar, Lal and Rahul each grabbed three wickets to fold up Birgunj’s innings at 155 in 47.1 overs. Kanchan Thapa (22), Bibek Dali (20) and Binay Shah (19) made some runs.
At TU, Gyanendra led from front in both batting, and surprisingly bowling, for his team’s convincing victory. Biratnagar elected to bat first and scored 142 in 43.3 overs with opener Sunny Pun being the top scorer with 43 off 67 balls before felling to Prithu Baskota.
Sunny’s effort rescued Biratnagar’s batting as the team was once reeling at 24/3 as pacer Rupesh Srivastav bowled well to take all three wickets within seventh over. Sunnay partnered Ravi Roy (23 off 58) for 67 runs before Ravi became Gyanendra’s first victim.
Biratnagar lost four wickets for mere three runs to go down to 94/7 from 91/3. Only Santosh Adhikari’s valiant 19 off 36 took them to a fighting total. Prithu and Gyanendra each took three wickets as Ritesh Singh took the remaining wicket.