On Tuesday, the women’s cricket tournament at the Hangzhou Asian Games began with Indonesia defeating Mongolia and Malaysia defeating Hong Kong at the Zhejiang University of Technology Pingfeng Cricket Field.
A debut to forget
In a relatively unsuccessful performance, Mongolia was dismissed for only 15 runs in a T20I match against Indonesia. This was in response to a target of 188 set by the Indonesian women’s team during the 2023 Asian Games.
However, It’s interesting to note that this is not the lowest team total ever recorded by a team on an international stage. No batter was unable to reach a double-digit score. Seven out of the eleven batters were also given the boot for a duck.
From the bowling department, Andriani Andriani was Indonesia’s best bowler, taking four wickets and allowing just eight runs in her four overs.
Defining Odds to play on the big stage
Mongolia’s coach, David Talalla, said he was happy with his young team, which has an average age of 19. He also shared that the players have extremely few resources and experience of playing cricket at a competitive level.
Sharing the plight of the players further, he informed that, More than half of Mongolian players had never even left Mongolia, and this was their first time playing on a grass wicket, having practiced only on an artificial surface.
Mongolia’s equipment is secondhand from Australia, and its four bats were supplied by a French ambassador whose wife is English and a cricket fanatic. Talalla himself works for free.
He exaplined, “I know we’ve only made 15 runs but none of our girls have played the game for longer than two years and we know what a technical game it is.
We’ve only got a squad of 12 — that’s all we could afford to bring,”
“The whole idea is the longer picture — cricket in Mongolia, who would have thought it?”
Further, he said “Even myself, I’ve only been in the job here for five weeks as a high-performance coach but six months ago, I didn’t even know they played cricket in Mongolia. I think most of the world didn’t.”
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