Friday 07 / February / 2025
Muscat: Oman’s national cricket team is attempting to bounce back from its early exit during the Twenty20 World Cup by qualifying for the 50-over World Cup, which is to be held in India in 2023.
In an exclusive interview with the Times of Oman, Duleep Mendis, the national team’s chief development officer and head coach, said the Reds have realised which areas of their game needs improvement, and are currently on track for qualifying for the next World Cup.
“There were many lessons we learned from our time at the ongoing Twenty20 World Cup, and we realised the areas we need to improve,” he said. “The two main areas that need working on are our middle-order batting, and our fielding, and now that we know we lack in these two disciplines, we have modified our training sessions to address these concerns.”
Games from one of the two qualifying rounds of the World Cup were held in Oman. The other round was held in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, where the rest of the tournament is also currently underway.
Although they handsomely beat Papua New Guinea by 10 wickets in their opening qualifier in Amerat, Oman went on to lose to both Bangladesh and Scotland. Mendis believes that had his team been sharper with both bat and ball, they would’ve made it to the Super 12s.
“We must understand that this is the first time our boys were playing in front of a home audience, at such a big tournament…getting there was a remarkable achievement for us, and we want to make sure we are able to build on what we have done so far,” he explained. “I believe the pressures of the tournament got to the team, and if you want to play elite-level cricket, you need to be able to handle the challenges that come with it.
“If you crack while you are out there on the pitch, there is often no time to recover, particularly in a format as competitive as Twenty20, where one or two overs can make the difference in the result,” added Mendis. “Had we gotten maybe 20 or 30 more runs on the board against both Bangladesh and Scotland this might have seen us through to the next round.”
Reiterating that this tournament has been a fantastic learning experience for team Oman – which has become the first associate-level country to both host and play in a World Cup-level tournament – with the Twenty20 World Cup coming in the midst of qualifiers for the 2023 edition of the One-Day International format of the game.
10 teams will qualify for the tournament, including hosts India, who have sealed automatic qualification. Based on their ranking, teams aiming to qualify for the World Cup are split into three leagues: the Super League, League 2, and the Challenge League.
The Super League features the top 13 cricket playing nations in the world, League 2 features seven associate-level teams (Oman being one of them), and the Challenge League contains teams ranked even lower, and split into two groups, each containing six teams.
The teams that finish in the top eight positions of the Super League will automatically qualify for the 2023 Cricket World Cup, while the other five will need to book passage through the qualifier. The qualifier features another 10 teams, including the teams that finish in the top three places in League 2. These eight teams taking part in the qualifiers will be joined by two teams that make it through the qualifier play-offs.
The play-offs feature the four teams at the bottom of League 2, and the two teams that finish atop their Challenge League groups. From among these six teams, two will make it through to the aforementioned qualifiers.
Two teams from among the 10 in the Cricket World Cup qualifiers will earn passage to the tournament proper, and both Duleep Mendis, and Pankaj Khimji, Oman Cricket Chairman, are confident the team will travel to India in 2023.
“Oman are currently on top of League 2, so if we continue playing the way we are at the moment, we will surely be there in the qualifiers,” said Mendis.
“Just before the World Cup, we played a triangular series as part of our qualification process, at home against Scotland and PNG, and were successful, and we are looking forward to the next round of games.” Pankaj Khimji said, “We have four triangular series to play soon after the World Cup. It will be a busy period for us and the boys. But they are very excited about the tournaments that lie ahead, as well as the chance to play in another World Cup, so they will give it their all.”
