67-run defeat<\/a> at the hands of Australia in Colombo to leave Ireland in a precarious position.<\/p>\nThe Aussies posted 182-6 and, after losing captain Paul Stirling to injury, Ireland slumped to 115 all out in reply. <\/p>\n
Heinrich Malan’s side need to win their final two Group B matches – against Zimbabwe and Oman on Saturday and Tuesday respectively – and for results elsewhere to go their way to finish in the top two qualifying spots. <\/p>\n
“There’s still plenty that can happen – we just have to stay competitive, stay keen and we’re not out of this yet,” said Tucker, who made 24 and stood in as captain after Stirling’s retirement. <\/p>\n
“We just have to make sure we rock up for the next game and put in a really positive performance. I think we didn’t start the game the way we would have liked – Australia got away from us in the powerplay.<\/p>\n
“Our spinners made a great effort to pull it back, but ultimately they finished off really well before we lost wickets in our own powerplay. We got off to a pretty poor start.”<\/p>\n
Stirling took a brilliant catch to dismiss Josh Inglis but it proved costly for Ireland after the opener hobbled off after the first delivery of Ireland’s reply.<\/p>\n
“I think he just took a knock on his knee taking the catch – he tried to go out and see our innings off to a good start but he wasn’t able to unfortunately,” added Tucker.<\/p>\n
“It was massively disappointing and I think after that it sort of set a train in motion. Hopefully he’ll be back for the next game.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wicketkeeper Lorcan Tucker says Ireland have not given up hope of making the Super 8s at the 2026…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-421483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421483","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=421483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}