The national U-19 women cricket team on Monday, September 12, made history as they stunned Tanzania by 6 wickets in the final to win the ICC U19 Women’s T20 World Cup Africa qualifier and book a ticket to the 2023 World Cup in South Africa.
Tanzania reached the final unbeaten in five games and were looking to end the qualifying campaign on an impressive note as they looked more confident of booking a ticket to the World Cup away from a team they beat in the group stages a week ago.
The East African neighbors won the toss and elected to bat first in the first innings during which they thought they were going to get the job done early.
However, the team’s efficiency on the ground was way less impressive than before as they saw their run rate go down from 6.00 when they beat Rwanda by one run to 4.66 during Monday’s final as they set just 84 runs for Rwanda to chase before all the players were eliminated in the 18th over.
Rwanda needed 85 runs in the second innings to win the final and it only took the young women 15 overs to chase the Tanzanians’ run score and go on to win the game by six wickets and finish the job with a 5.48 run rate.
Henriette Ishimwe has always delivered whenever it mattered throughout the qualifier campaign neither did she disappoint in the finale as she put in the player-of-the-match performance after making three wickets to help his team make sure that Tanzanians were all out after 18 overs.
The Rwandan team will return to Kigali with a trophy that head coach Nhamburo and his players earlier promised before the national team left for Gaborone for the qualifiers a fortnight ago.
The ticket is regarded so far as the biggest achievement in the country’s cricket history while the Zimbabwean coach continues to write more achievements on his CV, having previously won the Africa Regional World Cup Qualifiers 2016, the 4 Nations U-19 Girls Tournament Botswana in 2014 and also qualified the country for the 2017 Global World Cup Women in Sri Lanka.
He also helped Namibia’s women cricket team to become the 2019 Africa Regional World Cup qualifiers runners-up before qualifying them for the 2019 Global Women World Cup Qualifiers in Scotland.
The U-19 Women’s T20 World Cup event will be a 16-team affair with 11 full member nations – Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe.
Out of the five remaining spots, four will be determined by regional Qualifiers, while the fifth spot has been automatically awarded to the United States on account of the side being the only Associate nation eligible to compete under the ICC’s Event Pathway Participation Criteria in the Americas region.