I was almost in tears laughing - Marsh on Naib's suspected cramp mischief

Australia’s T20I captain Mitchell Marsh said Gulbadin Naib's suspected cramp mischief during Afghanistan’s must-win clash against Bangladesh is “one of the funniest things I've ever seen on a cricket field". In the last Super 8 encounter of the 2024 T20 World Cup on June 24 (Monday), the Afghanistan all-rounder went down on the ground trying to waste time.

It was the 12th over of the second innings, and Afghanistan were just about ahead of Bangladesh by two runs in the DLS method. Afghanistan’s head coach, Jonathan Trott, was guarding the edge of the dugout, pacing to and fro to the boundary line, calming his team out in the middle. Trott’s message seemed quite clear: ‘Slow things down’. But how? 

That’s when Naib decided to take matters into his own hands. With the weather gloomy and rain beginning to increase in intensity, the all-rounder went down on the ground, clutching his hamstring. Naib was fielding at the slip cordon before throwing himself to the ground rapidly. 

In the few minutes that Naib was on the ground, the rain became quite heavy, to the point that the umpires asked the two teams to get off the field. As the two teams walked off the field, the visuals showed Litton Das mocking Naib’s fall in a ‘fun banter’ with Afghanistan’s reserve player, who was on the field running the drinks.

While Afghanistan skipper Rashid Khan was far from impressed, it certainly helped them as they raced off the field due to rain. Had rain stopped the clash, Afghanistan would have been crowned the winners by a slender margin of two runs. Funnily enough, later on, Naib returned to bowl his first over of the clash, where he removed Tanzim Hasan Sakib. 

"I was almost in tears laughing and at the end of the day it had no bearing on the game. So we can laugh about it now – but gee it was funny. It was outstanding,” Cricket.com.au reported Marsh as saying. 

Afghanistan eventually defeated Bangladesh by eight runs and qualified for the semis of an ICC event for the first time in their history. As a result, Australia were knocked out of the tournament. Australia lost their last two Super 8 games against Afghanistan and India and Marsh didn’t shy away from admitting that Rashid Khan and his men deserve to be in the semis.

"We watched it as a group. It was obviously a pretty amazing game, wasn't it? A lot of twists and turns. Obviously, you want to keep playing this tournament and that was our only way of doing it. But there's also the element that it was completely out of our control and we only had ourselves to blame for that,” said Marsh

"We were all flat (when the final wicket fell). We were desperate to continue on in the tournament. But fair play to Afghanistan – they beat us and they beat Bangladesh and they deserve to be in the semi-finals."

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