WESTBURY, N.Y. (AP) — Canada’s inexperienced batters crumbled against pace for yet another low score at the Twenty20 World Cup as Pakistan finally registered its first win.
The four-pronged Pakistan pace attack, led by Mohammad Amir’s figures of 2-13, contained Canada to 106-7 with only opening batter Aaron Johnson showing aggression in his 44-ball knock of 52.
Mohammad Rizwan’s unbeaten 53 anchored Pakistan, which lost to fiece cricket rival India on Sunday, to 107-3 in 17.3 overs for a seven-wicket win.
“Good for us, we needed this win,” Pakistan skipper Babar Azam said. “We started well with the bowling, in the first six overs (and) we know we had to be up to the mark.”
Johnson sent early tremors into Pakistan’s camp with his back-to-back boundaries off Shaheen Shah Afridi’s first two balls of the match.
But Amir, who came out of retirement for the World Cup, hit the right areas straight away and buckled the batters as wickets continued to fall.
Johnson, who was dropped on 44 by Fakhar Zaman at mid-wicket, hit four boundaries and raised his half-century with his fourth six before he too was finally undone by Naseem Shah in the 14th over.
Fast bowler Haris Rauf became the third quickest bowler to complete 100 wickets in T20 internationals when he had Shreyas Movva (2) caught behind and then found the edge of Ravinderpal Singh’s bat in the same over to finish with 2-26.
“Definitely, it was a bit disappointing,” Pakistan-born Canada skipper Saad Bin Zafar said. “We wanted to play a positive brand of cricket and I think the wicket was not very helpful. It was difficult to bat early on and not a good toss to lose. We were about 25 to 30 runs short.”
Pakistan’s experiment with Saim Ayub as an opener in the World Cup for the first time didn’t work out as the left-hander struggled to score 6 off 12 balls before he edged Dillon Heyliger (2-18) to wicketkeeper inside the batting power play.
Rizwan and Babar (33) then had a 63-run stand before the Pakistan skipper banged his bat on the wicket in anger when he tried to guide Heyliger to third man but couldn’t beat the wicketkeeper. Rizwan’s run-a-ball half-century saw Pakistan over the line.
Pakistan, the 2022 runner-up, needs to beat Ireland in its last game and also hope co-host U.S. lose both its remaining games against India and Ireland to have a chance of advancing to the Super 8s on superior net run-rate.
The United States made a history by beating Pakistan in a Super Over tiebreaker in Dallas after it had defeated Canada in a high-scoring opening game of the tournament it is jointly co-hosting with the West Indies.
There were two other matches scheduled for Tuesday. In Antigua, 2021 champion Australia won the toss and opted to bowl first against Namibia. The Sri Lanka-Nepal match was delayed because of rain in Florida.
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