Namibia completed their Cricket World Cup League Two campaign in style with a six wicket victory against the United States on Tuesday.
The win saw them finishing fifth overall on the eight-team log, and just missing out on direct qualification for next year’s final Cricket World Cup qualifier.
Despite the defeat, the United States had already finished on top of the log, and will now be joined by Scotland, The Netherlands and Oman at the 2027 World Cup Qualifier, while Namibia will still have a chance of qualifying via a playoff qualifying tournament for the bottom four teams.
On Tuesday, Namibia won the toss and sent the USA to bat, and despite their bowlers making some early inroads, the USA recovered well from 184/7 with 10 overs to go, to reach 277/7.
Sheyan Jayasuriya scored 76 and Monank Patel 30 at the top of the order, while Shayan Jahangir (73 not out) and Harmeet Singh (54 not out) shared an unbroken seventh wicket partnership of 93 runs.
For Namibia’ Jack Brassell took two wickets for 59 runs, Max Heingo took 2/69 and Bernard Scholtz took 2/39.
In reply, Namibia lost Michael van Lingen (11) and Jan Frylinck (29), but a great 149-run partnership by Namibian captain Gerhard Erasmus and Louren Steenkamp put Namibia in control of the match.
Steenkamp went on to reach his century before being dismissed for 102 off 114 balls, while Erasmus fell just short of his century, being caught in the deep for 95 off 102 balls.
Zane Green added 28 not out and JJ Smit 8 not out as Namibia reached the target with nine balls to spare.
Erasmus’ knock also placed him in a distinguished group of batters from Associate nations who have scored more than 2 500 runs. He is now tenth on the list with 2 577 runs at an average of 37.89, while he has scored 21 half centuries and two centuries.
Despite the win, Erasmus said he thought they could have done better.
“I thought it was a very good toss to win, but I felt that our bowling couldn’t quite get it in good areas. At about the 43-over mark we felt that if we can put in a good back of the innings stint, we could hold them to 250, but unfortunately we didn’t make the step up. We missed a couple of close chances and catches, just bouncing in front of us or just over our heads, so there were a few unlucky ones but that’s the name of the game and I felt they got about 30 to 40 too many,” he said.
“We just batted big – a few balls still stayed low, but it was just about grinding the opposition down,” he added.
Erasmus said their were a few ups and downs in their Cricket World Cup League 2 campaign that started in 2024.
“It was sort of a full cycle. We started off with three wins out of four in Nepal, and then went through a tough patch that really tested our squad depth. I felt like over the past three or four years we didn’t really manage to grow our squad depth to carry us through in that middle two-year period,” he said.
“We didn’t get that many wins, but we’ve regrouped really well and got the likes of Jack Brassell as a youngster and a couple of other new players, like all the teams did, and basically won towards the back end of the series,” he added.
