Australia defeated Afghanistan by a close margin in a must win game for Defending Champions.
Rashid Khan’s 48 in 23 balls goes in Vain as they failed to chase the target of 169 and fell 4 runs short.
Losing Captain, Mohammad Nabi said:
A really good game of cricket, they started really well, and at the end, Farooqi bowled well. The way we started in the powerplay and in the middle, but we throw away those 4 wickets in the middle under pressure. It’s really tough to play a game and then don’t play for 10 days. We did not get any momentum at all through this tournament. Day by day we improve and today was a fantastic game for us.
Winning Captain, Matthew Wade said:
We gave Stonis the last over, to have the allrounder bowl the last over is pretty nerve-wracking. I played him in IPL and I have seen him do it 3-4 times. But never felt entirely sure at any point. We will stay here tonight and watch the game tomorrow, we will be hoping for an upset. We put ourselves in this position from the get-go, we have been slow in this tournament and hopefully, it doesn’t cost us. David was very close to selection tonight and we are very hopeful they (David and Finch) will come through if we get there.
Player of the Match, Glenn Maxwell said:
Afghanistan played really well, they struck the ball really cleanly. At the start, they put us under pressure in the powerplay. We were able to hold them back but then there was some pretty clean hitting towards the back end and gave us a bit of a scare. It was nice to have an impact in the field. I knew I wasn’t going to have much of an impact with the ball with the conditions they were. To have an impact is nice. During the day, it was quite slow and taking spin, it was holding up a little bit. It was quite hard to press the issue. We got to about the 12th over mark where we just had to put a total on the board to make sure we gave ourselves a chance of winning the game. Even though we were trying to go hard, they bowled extremely well in the last four overs. They executed their plans and it was hard to get away. We put ourselves in this situation, but hopefully Sri Lanka can do the job for us.
