Coach Odoyo laments batting woes as Kenya tumble

Kenya national cricket team Head Coach Thomas Odoyo has blamed imprecise batting and his players’ inability to cope with pressure when chasing runs as Hong Kong cruised to a 39 run Duckworth-Lewis victory over Kenya on Sunday.

Captain Rakep Patel won five wickets for the Kenyans on Friday in the first of their two-game series of the ICC World Cricket League Championship, inspiring them to a three wickets win but it was his opposite counterpart, Babar Hayat that had the final say on Sunday with a brilliant knock of 78.

The win moved Hong Kong up to 11 points from eight games, leaving them a point adrift of joint table-toppers Papua New Guinea and Netherlands.

“Our batsmen really had a bad day yesterday. They gave away too many wickets unlike on Friday where we really did a good. There should be mental concentration when batting and I think we were not keen with the Hong Kong bowlers,” Odoyo told Citizen Digital.

Odoyo – who is the first and only Kenyan bowler thus far to achieve the double of 50 wickets and 1000 runs – admitted the team now faces an uphill task in their bid to earn qualification to the final round of qualifiers considering only two teams will qualify for the 2019 World Cup in England and urges his players to take positives and show hunger to get better results.

“Although the result leaves us on our current position (fifth), I feel we needed to overtake Hong Kong in the standings. World cup qualification is our target and it is up to the players to push on with great effort to enable us enter the qualification round first. It is a difficult job ahead of us but we must withstand the pressure,” he added.

The Kenyans are set to resume training in a week’s time ahead of their next Championship game against Nepal in March next year before hosting Netherlands between the months of June and August.

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-Report by Richard Obaga.