Ireland defeated Papa New Guinea by 41 runs to make a strong start in their bid to qualify for the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup. <\/p>\n
Orla Prendergast’s 56 helped Ireland to 146 and Papa New Guinea could not come close on the return.<\/p>\n
Arlene Kelly took two wickets to limit PNG to 105, and Ireland’s focus will now turn to their second qualifier with the USA on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The top three teams from each group will qualify for the Super Sixes, and the top four teams will then progress to the finals in England in June.<\/p>\n
Ireland won the toss and elected to bat first, and although Sarah Forbes was dismissed on six, 42 from captain Gaby Lewis and Prendergast’s half-century put Ireland in a strong position.<\/p>\n
Leah Paul was out for 16 and Prendergast was eventually dismissed on 56 by Hane Tau with Ireland on 125-4 in the 17th over.<\/p>\n
Ireland lost Laura Delany and Rebecca Stokell in the final over, but still recorded a solid score of 146.<\/p>\n
Lloyd Tennant’s side limited Papa New Guinea’s response to 56-4 as Hollan Doriga, Konio Oala, captain Brenda Tau and Pauka Siaka were all dismissed. <\/p>\n
With PNG’s top order out of the picture, Ireland had enough in hand to take a comfortable victory. <\/p>\n
It was also an impressive bowling performance from player of the match Prendergast, who only conceded nine runs from four overs. <\/p>\n
“It was a nice start to the tournament,” said Prendergast.<\/p>\n
“We set a really competitive target and thankfully we backed it up with the ball”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland defeated Papa New Guinea by 41 runs to make a strong start in their bid to qualify…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-421658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cricket","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}