Namibia and Zimbabwe have booked their places at the 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup after reaching the final of the African qualifying tournament in Harare.<\/p>\n
Namibia beat Tanzania by 63 runs in their semi-final to reach a fourth successive edition of the finals.<\/p>\n
Hosts Zimbabwe then cruised to a seven-wicket victory over Kenya to qualify for the first time since 2022.<\/p>\n
Kenya won the toss and elected to bat first, and ended on 122-6 thanks largely to Rakep Patel’s innings of 65 from 47 balls.<\/p>\n
Brian Bennett top scored with 51 off 25 as the Chevrons chased down their target with five overs to spare.<\/p>\n
Namibia and Zimbabwe will meet in the tournament final on Saturday, with both sides knowing they will travel to India and Sri Lanka next year.<\/p>\n
In the opening match earlier on Thursday, Namibia had slipped to 41-4 against Tanzania but a partnership of 88 runs between captain Gerhard Erasmus (55 off 41) and JJ Smit (61 not out off 43) helped the Eagles post 174-6.<\/p>\n
All-rounder Smit then took 3-16 and Ben Shikongo recorded figures of 3-21 to help restrict the East Africans to 111-8 in reply.<\/p>\n
Namibia beat the Netherlands, Ireland and Scotland on their T20 World Cup debut in the UAE and Oman in 2021 before exiting in the Super 12s.<\/p>\n
The side, however, failed to get past the initial group stage at the 2022 and 2024 editions of the tournament.<\/p>\n
Twenty nations will contest next year’s World Cup which will be held from 7 February to 8 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Namibia and Zimbabwe have booked their places at the 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup after reaching the final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-180018","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}