19-year-old Yuvraj Samra became the youngest player to score T20 World Cup century<\/p>\n
Canada batter Yuvraj Samra’s exhilarating century has proved in vain as New Zealand advanced to cricket’s T20 World Cup Super 8s with an eight-wicket win.<\/p>\n
New Zealand’s resounding victory on Tuesday knocked 2024 semi-finalist Afghanistan out of the tournament, with the Black Caps joining England, South Africa, West Indies, India and Sri Lanka in the next round.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s Group B game against Ireland at Pallekele was washed out later on Tuesday, eliminating Australia, who needed an Ireland win to survive after their loss to Sri Lanka a day earlier.<\/p>\n
On a perfect batting wicket on Tuesday, Glenn Phillips (76 not out) and Rachin Ravindra (59 not out) led New Zealand to 2-176 in 15.1 overs as the Black Caps claimed their third win in Group D.<\/p>\n
Samra’s 110 off 65 balls, which included six sixes and 11 fours, had earlier guided Canada to 4-173 after captain Dilpreet Bajwa won the toss and elected to bat.<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old Samra, who caught the eye last year when he smashed a 15-ball half century against Bahamas, became the first batter from an associate country to score a hundred at the T20 World Cup.<\/p>\n
“I manifested this moment ever since we qualified for the World Cup. Every single day I dreamed about scoring a hundred on this stage,” he said.<\/p>\n
“To do it here … as the youngest player in this World Cup \u2013 it’s truly a dream come true.”<\/p>\n
Bajwa made 36 off 39 balls and together with Samra put on 116 for the first wicket.<\/p>\n
New Zealand struggled to stem the flow of runs and felt the absence of captain Mitchell Santner, who was ruled out of the game due to a “dodgy burger” on Monday night, and fast bowler Lockie Ferguson.<\/p>\n
Ferguson is on paternity leave but is expected to re-join the team for the Super 8s.<\/p>\n
Samra was dropped, but not before he had raised his century off 58 deliveries, when the ball burst through the hands of James Neesham at long-off.<\/p>\n
His belligerent knock ended in the final over when Phillips caught him at deep backward square leg at the second attempt.<\/p>\n
When it came to New Zealand’s reply, Finn Allen and Tim Seifert fell inside four balls in the power play before Phillips and Ravindra shared an electrifying 146-run partnership in just 12 overs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"19-year-old Yuvraj Samra became the youngest player to score T20 World Cup century Canada batter Yuvraj Samra’s exhilarating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85,83],"class_list":["post-486778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486778","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=486778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}