USA went down to a second consecutive defeat to Barbados in another closely fought affair, this time at the 3W’s Oval despite Monank Patel’s impressive innings of 80, the highest individual Team USA score of the tournament so far.
Having been put in to bat after losing the toss, USA had to recover from the early loss of skipper Jaskaran Malhotra for 9 and the in-form Steven Taylor for a first ball duck. Alex Amsterdam came together with Monank Patel to build a superb partnership of 77 to build a good platform for USA to drive on to a competitive total.
When Amsterdam fell for 40, the quick loss of Salver followed and the USA inning was then interrupted by a heavy rain shower that took the players off for over 40 minutes. Returning to the crease without any over lost, Patel would have had his eyes on a maiden USA century for himself and the team in the tournament. It wasn’t to be as the impressive left-arm seam of Dominic Drakes had him caught as one of his 4 wickets.
It took his some solid late order hitting from Jan Nisar Khan, Roy Silva and Jessy Singh to drive Team USA up to a competitive 212 for 8 from their 50 overs.
With the USA bowling attack having caused problems for all the opposition so far in the Super50, the team would have been confident of defending the score but the on fire Barbadian batsmen had other ideas. Sheyne Moseley got them off to a flier with some impressive striking in his innings of 65 off 50 balls before Usman Ashraf trapped him LBW in his first over.
The USA spinners shared 5 wickets between them with Nosthush Kenjige continuing his superb spell of form with his left-arm spin taking 2 for 54, Usman Ashraf took 2 for 34 and Steven Taylor’s off-spin took 1 for 36.
4 wickets fell for just 33 runs late in the innings as USA got the joy some good bowling deserved but it was too late to threaten the win that Team USA were looking for to get them really into the mix for a semi-final spot from Group B and Barbados Pride ran out 4 wicket winners in enough time to take the bonus point victory as well.
There’s no time for a break though for USA now and it two days they face the Leeward Islands looking for a second win over the Hurricanes in the group, check out the schedule in full here.
You can watch back on the match in full, which was live streamed by Cricket West Indies below.
