A valiant effort falls just shy

On a day with runs being scored by everyone, Canada fell just 12 runs shy when the final wicket had fallen. Bermuda batted well throughout the morning session to put up a formidable 272 runs, leaving Canada to chase that in that total in the afternoon. Canada started wonderfully with captain John Davison and debutant Sundeep Jyoti who put up the first 50 runs in under 10 overs. Davison lost Jyoti there, but kept going with Bagai and they had Canada at 91 runs when Davison popped on up and was caught. At this point, Canada slowed down in their run rate dramatically, perhaps fearing another collapse like they have suffered in ODIs recently. However, they would need to crank it up if they wanted to win this one.

Abdool Samad and Ian Billcliff built a strong partnership of 70 runs for the fourth wicket, and Canada were in it. Billcliff was joined by George Codrington, and they had both found their stroke and looked as though they would see Canada to their total with time to spare. However, what would have been another boundary landed in the hands of Cann off the bat of Billcliff, and a couple of bad running decisions by the Canadians resulted in 2 runouts. The second of these, Steven Welsh was extremely close, and from my vantage point looked safe. But the umpire gave it out, and that was a huge 9th wicket. It came down to the final over with Canada's 10 and 11 batsmen looking to score 12 runs. With Bermudans all around the boundary, Kevin Sandher came close, his big slog came up about 10 feet short and was easily caught by Lionel Cann at the long-on boundary. Canada were lead by Billcliff (59) and Davison (55), Bermuda's top bowlers were Hasan Durham (4-45) and George O'Brien (3-62). Bermuda's bats were lead by Iriving Romaine's 101, the pick of Canada's bowlers was Austin Codrington who took 3-31 in 9 overs. Steven Welsh was a little disappointing in his debut, 68 runs from 8 overs (no wickets) and only 2 runs with the bat.

Canada need to forget about this result, but remember their batting performances moving into their second game of the tournament against Cayman Islands tomorrow. I will once again have live scores, whether here on this blog or on BigCricket (the link is in the sidebar).