The Afghanistan Cricket team had to remain content with the silver medal in the cricket competition of the recently played Asian games in Korea. They lost to Sri Lanka in the final match.
Since, cricket is not famous in Korea, it was thought that the stadium would be empty during the game, but, surprisingly, people showed up and they showed up in decent numbers. The spectators’ count would surely have been close to 1500, if not more and among the spectators, there were not only Afghans and Sri Lankans, there were some Koreans too which shows that this game of 22 yards is getting bigger day by day.
Afghanistan, which bowled first, drew the first blood early, but, thereafter, the wickets were hard to come by for some time as a good, aggressive partnership got built for the second wicket by Sri Lanka.
But, from the 10th over onwards, the Sri Lankan batting lost the way and what had appeared to be a big total in the making remained a modest one.
134 was the number that Afghanistan had to get to in their chase to make sure that they win the gold medal for their country.
Unfortunately, batting second on that sticky pitch proved to be very difficult. The Afghan players fell one by one against the wonderful spin attack of Sri Lanka and could not even reach half way through.
A 68-run defeat is what the Afghans had to suffer, but, they can be very proud of the silver medal as well. They have come second in a tournament in which two test nations namely Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were participating.
For Sri Lanka, on the other hand, it was the first gold medal in the event. So, it was a big achievement for them too.