Niall O'Brien: We let ourselves and Ireland down

Niall O’Brien 10:20 10/03/2016
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  • Losing to Oman has to be one of the toughest, if not the toughest loss to take in my professional career. Oman played a really great game; I’m not trying to take anything away from them but we should be beating them day in, day out.

    We were off the mark with both bat and ball and made some crucial errors at important times in the game. To say I am gutted after the loss is an understatement.

    Paul Stirling got us off to a flyer with the bat and looked in great form before he was caught at cover to one of the catches of the tournament from Zeeshan Maqsood. We had a number of starts with the bat but we didn’t have a substantial score to help us get to 165/170 which is what was required on a good pitch like HPCA Stadium.

    The Oman openers came out firing and put us under pressure from the start. We fought and scrapped and Kevin was excellent with the ball picking up two crucial top order wickets. We got gain a foothold in the game but somehow managed to let Oman back in and unfortunately some wides, no balls and a ball sneaking past myself cost us dearly. You can’t help but feel you have let your team and country down when you make an error and there are many of us who feel very low.

    How do we move on from here? Well it’s fairly simple. We need to win our two games against Bangladesh and Holland and win them well in order to qualify on net run rate. It’s a bit of a long shot but it’s all we have to cling on to at the moment, so we have to pull our socks up and keep our heads high and get the job done.

    It’s not going to be easy but we have no time to mope around as we have two more games in the space of three days.

    Bangladesh looked to be playing with confidence when they beat Netherlands on Wednesday. They had a terrific Asia Cup campaign so will be expected to progress through the group; hopefully we can put them under some pressure and get the win we need.

    It’s all about how you react in sport and it will be a real test of our resolve to ensure we bounce back.

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