Australian T20I captain Mitchell Marsh has revealed his first reaction to seeing Afghanistan’s Gulbadin Naib’s controversial ‘injury” during his team’s crunch T20 World Cup 2024 match against Bangladesh.
Afghanistan defeated Bangladesh by 8 runs via the DLS method and in the process eliminated Australia from the race for the semi-finals. Afghanistan qualified for their maiden ICC knockout game and will face South Africa on June 26 in the 1st Semi-final in Trinidad.
Australia, having lost to Afghanistan and India, expected Bangladesh to beat Rashid Khan’s men, although by a tiny margin, to advance to the semi-finals. And it almost appeared to be possible, with Litton Das leading the charge alone with a courageous half-century knock in a rain-soaked see-saw contest in Kingstown.
During the game, just as Kingstown had its first drizzle, Afghanistan coach Jonathan Trott was spotted signaling the players to slow down the play, even though the team was three runs ahead of the DLS par score in the 12th over of the second innings.
Gulbadin Naib, who was standing in the slip, suddenly collapsed to the ground, holding his hamstring, causing a few minutes of delay before the covers had to be put on.
In tears laughing: Mitchell Marsh on seeing Gulbadin Naib’s antics
While Gulbadin created humorous memes immediately following the incident, he drew much condemnation when he returned to the field when play restarted, picked up a wicket, and joined Afghanistan’s raucous celebrations.
However, Mitchell Marsh, the Australia captain saw the funny side of Naib’s antics and revealed that he was in tears laughing watching the whole thing unfold.
On the other hand, however, the Australian all-rounder said that it was difficult to watch the team suffer back-to-back losses in the Super Eight, which resulted in Australia’s elimination from the semifinals.
“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. 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.
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,” Marsh was quoted as saying by cricket.com.au.