The Nepali U-19 team on Wednesday returned from their ICC U-19 World Cup Division 1 Qualifier for Asia Region campaign finishing runners-up behind new Test entrants Afghanistan.

While Nepal lost a chance to qualify for their second consecutive youth World Cup, the Afghans underlined their supremacy in age-group cricket making light work of all their opponents during the Qualifier.

Nepal, a side that performed its worst with bat failing to reach triple figures in the entire tournament, were hammered by Afghanistan in both their matches. Coach Binod Das had a brief conversation with the Post about Nepal’s performance in Singapore. Excerpts: 

How does it feel to realise that you have lost a World Cup spot? 

It feels really bad that our hard work wasn’t enough to take us to the World Cup, but a deserving team qualified. Afghanistan were a standout team in this competition and they played good cricket. Our batting let us down throughout the tournament. We struggled to find rhythm in our batting. Still, we managed to win against other two teams quite easily but against teams like Afghanistan, we had to be at our best which sadly couldn’t happen.

What do you think is the reason behind Nepal’s batting failures?

We just couldn’t find the rhythm in batting. The pitches in Singapore were not that easy to bat on. You need to spend time on the pitch to score runs. Patience was key but unfortunately our batsmen didn’t show that. But it has been a good learning curve for the boys. But let’s not forget that they are still young and hardly play cricket due to the lack of domestic cricket. So we need to be a little patient with them.

The current team had only five new faces from the ones that played well in Sri Lanka during the ACC U-19 Cup. So did the pitch alone played part in the team’s batting woes?

Just consider how much cricket did they play after Asia Cup. We need to keep them involved to expect their improvement. Other teams are consistently playing cricket and have got better. Having a 20-day camp prior to a tournament will only help form a team. To improve you need a lot more cricket than that.

How is the team dealing with the disappointment of not being in World Cup? 

We did make best use of the facilities that we had in India. We worked hard on our fitness, fielding, bowling and batting. Among those four aspects, all came good apart from batting. I believe it’s a difficult art and it will take some time to do well consistently. We will try to put in more work in our batting and look to improve in the next outing.

Don’t you think Nepal need a batting coach?

Of course it’s high time for us to get a batting coach. I hope once these issues get resolved we can look to do so. At the moment, all of us are working as a volunteer. I hope the cricket board gets sorted out and we all get a paid job.

What lies ahead now?

We are going to compete in the ACC U-19 Premier in September. The tournament will be a qualifier for the U-19 Asia Cup in November. We need to get a proper system to achieve development.