Nitish Kumar scored his first century in a List A game on Wednesday with his 104 against Uganda that helped Canada to 296 for six; a total that set Canada on the road to a win by 111 runs. Nitish’s innings included ten boundaries and a six, his 104 came from 106 balls.
Nitish told ICC MediaComms “I was struggling for the first part of the tournament.”
On Wednesday against Uganda “ The wicket was pretty good at the start, so I thought if I played my shots it would be a wicket to get a high score on.”
“I had the dropped catch?” He chuckled, then continued “(I) had to work pretty hard, it was not that easy as the wicket was a quite slow.”
“The whole innings? As a whole I had to score. Three games I didn’t do anything.”
Looking ahead to Canada’s last round-robin match against host Namibia on Friday, Nitish said ”We have to win big next match. We’ve got to figure it out. We may have some plans. Namibia have been playing well but lost today (against Nepal).”

“Hopefully we can get them out cheaply and chase the runs down pretty quickly. The guys are pretty positive and they want to go for a big win. So I think it should be a good game.”
Nitish Kumar mentioned struggles with the bat in the earlier games. He and Rizwan Cheema were unable to join the Canadian squad for the warm-up games in Zimbabwe, so joined up with the squad in Namibia a few days before the tournament. Cheema struck a quick 57 from 30 balls to give Canada momentum in what proved to be a win by 46 runs against Kenya in the second game, played last Sunday.
Nitish’s previous top score in List A cricket was 67 made against Nepal in the January 2014 ICC World Cup Qualifier. There’s not much point in suggesting that an innings of 67 or 104 from Nitish Kumar, or from some others, would have been useful for Canada in Tuesday’s game against Nepal. But an improved performance on Friday could prove very useful, especially if some of the other guys also repeat their best batting efforts from Canada’s first four Pepsi ICC WCL Division Two games.
(Eddie Norfolk, based on an ICC MediaComms audio)