Shem Obado has attributed their last week’s poor show against Uganda to poor batting.
The national team ended the Kenya/Uganda cricket series on a poor note, losing 4-0 to the hosts. Obado, who was the series captain after replacing Rakep Patel who didn’t make the tour, said they will need to go back to the drawing board ahead of their next ICC World Cricket League Championship match against Netherlands here in Nairobi later in the year.
“We are hurting and it’s not ideal. Definitely the results do not reflect our target during the tour. We will have to go back to the drawing board and see what went wrong. The team didn’t perform well and we were all the time playing catch up with our hosts,” he said. Uganda, coached by immediate former national team coach Steve Tikolo, won all of the four matches to stun ‘favourites Kenya’.
Obado said the team failed with the bat and called for a review of the team tactics. “The batsmen didn’t put up enough runs for us on the board and it is for this reason that we were forced to play catch up and never quite got the momentum. The batsmen definitely need to improve,” he noted. Former captain Collins Obuya too was unhappy with the performance hence questioned the basic ability of his team-mates.
“If we are to improve, we must step up our batting. We must stay on the crease and face the 50 overs and play with the right basics rather than going for the big shots. Had we done the basics a bit better, we probably could have won a lot more matches,” he noted. Apart from batting, he said bowling was also not at its best as Kenya failed to bowl out the hosts even with changes in the bowling line up in almost every match.
Nehemiah Odhiambo, one of the most experienced player in the squad, played only two matches of the series, where his presence was not much felt. Lucas Oluoch and Eugene Ochieng, the other seam bowlers in the squad, also had a poor tour with none of them picking a wicket in the series. Kenya ‘A’ lost all their six matches in the last series in Uganda. But unlike the Kenya A side which featured players who had not trained together, the Odoyo’s side has contracted players who have been training four days a week under three coaches.