Babar Azam’s spectacular innings gets Pakistan an easy victory over Nepal. They won the match by a huge margin of 238 runs.
Pakistan scored 342/6 in their 50 overs while Nepal only managed to score 104/10 in 23.4 overs.
Firstly after winning the toss in their home town Pakistan opted to go for batting. Pakistan didn’t get a good start and at one point of time the home team had little trouble as they lost both of their openers in just 25 runs. Fakhar Zaman scored 14 runs while Imam-ul-Haq only made 5 runs. Then a solid partnership arose between captain Babar Azam and Mohd Rizwan of 86 runs. Rizwan made useful 44 runs.
After that Babar didn’t stop there and after his catch being dropped in the 29th over he became more and more dangerous. In his knock of 151 runs he took only 131 balls and hit 14 fours and 4 sixes. It was his 19th international century. He showed his ruthless form in the very first match of the Asia Cup. He was very much supported by Ithikhar Ahmed who scored his maiden century. He took just 67 balls to complete his century. Iftikhar scored 109 runs in 71 balls. He hit 11 fours and 4 sixes. Both put together a 214 runs partnership of the 5th wicket.
With the destructive knock of Iftikhar, Pakistan got 300 runs easily and scored 342 runs in 50 overs with the loss of 6 wickets.
Sompal Kami bowled some brilliant overs at the start but towards the end with the hard hitting of Iftikhar and Babar he went for 85 runs in his 10 overs and took 2 wickets. Karan KC and Sandeep Lamichhane get 1 wicket each.
Nepal from the start with the regular fall of wickets, they couldn’t survive much longer and lost the match. Aarif Sheikh (26 runs) and Sompal Kami (28 runs) tried to do something better for the team but as the asking rate went up, both of them departed. Both of them made 59 runs together for the 4th wicket. Rest all the players were going back to pavilion one after the other. 8 players scored in a single digit. Therefore the whole team got out in 23.4 overs and scored 104 runs.
Shadab Khan rounded the players with his spin and grabbed 4 wickets. Shaheen Afridi and Haris Rauf got 2 wickets each. Mohd Nawaz and Naseem Shah get 1 wicket each.
Babar Azam, Pakistan Captain and Player of the Match
“When I went in, the ball wasn’t coming on properly, so I was trying to build an innings with Rizwan. Then we had a different phase, sometimes Rizwan gave me confidence, sometimes I gave him belief. Iftikhar also played a great innings when he came on. When he came in, I told him to play his natural game and he was comfortable after 2-3 boundaries.
A couple of overs we weren’t up to the mark, but the way our pacers started and then the spinners were brilliant. This win will give us confidence. India Pakistan will always bring high intensity, we will try our best.”
Rohit Paudel, Nepal Captain
“We started well with the ball. But both set batters took the game away from us. We have batted better before and we missed out today. Wicket taking balls were not there in middle overs, but credit to Babar for the way he batted, credit to Pakistan. Learning from the game would be that we need to improve bowling in death overs, as a group we need to step up with the bat.”