Trading places? UAE men's team look intent on exiting ODI cricket just as their female colleagues are promoted

The National

15-05-2025

Maybe UAE cricket is not big enough to have two sides playing one-day international cricket. The national women's team were rightly lauded for promotion to that elite club last week. Esha Oza's side are thriving, to the point where they even attracted worldwide headlines for their razor-sharp thinking in winning a regional T20 qualifying fixture against Qatar on Saturday. The contrast to the listless men's team could not possibly be any starker. They appear to be racing towards an end to ODI status altogether after their latest shambolic display in Cricket World Cup League Two. They were thrashed by eight wickets by Scotland in the Netherlands, with more than half of their bowling effort still to go. The weak display has become their standard in the 50-over format. It was their fourth loss in five matches on tour, and leaves them rooted to the bottom of the division. The competition is nominally the start of the qualifying process for the next ODI World Cup. That is fanciful, though. More realistically, the UAE are playing to safeguard their right to play ODI cricket. The sides who finish in the bottom two of the eight-team league run the risk of losing that status. They could still salvage it via a convoluted process where they finish higher than the teams in the next tier of the competition structure in a qualifying tournament in the future. But, the way they have been playing for such an extended period of time, they really do not deserve it. The ODI side has been rotting for years now. They have three wins in 16 matches in the Cricket World Cup League Two cycle, and were abysmal at the end of the previous one, too. The national team had six months to prepare for the series in the Netherlands. What they spent that time doing, who knows? Even the basics have been beyond them. They had eight run outs in five matches on tour. Half that number would barely be excusable for a discipline which is so clearly controllable. How has it come to this? At the start of 2020, it felt as though the national team had set the foundations for a bright future. Chirag Suri had established himself at the top of the batting order, and other young talents of rare promise were following him through the youth ranks. Players of the calibre of Vriitya Aravind, Karthik Meiyappan, Kai Smith, Ali Naseer, Aayan Khan and Dhruv Parashar. Some have left the game entirely, or felt better served trying out a different system overseas instead. Those who remain appear to be in the doldrums, but there is plenty of time for each of them to have fulfilling international careers. Was there a specific moment which prompted the downturn? Looking back now, allowing Robin Singh, the previous head coach, to skip a tri-series in favour of the IPL might have had a lasting effect. If it is not so important for the coach to attend, that sends a message. It is also telling that it was Ahmed Raza who – as coach – oversaw the decision to retired out 10 batters in the women's game against Qatar at the weekend. That has widely praised as a tactical masterstroke. Since he was replaced as the captain of the men's team, in August 2022, the UAE have won 13 of 45 ODIs. They won that many in 16 fewer games on his watch. It has not been easy for those who have followed. Rahul Chopra is the latest to take on the poisoned chalice of captaincy. He tried his best to stimulate an improvement in the Netherlands, scoring a smart hundred in their one win on tour. But he was at a loss to explain his side's demise by the end of the series. 'We didn't execute our plan, we lost wickets in clusters, and we didn't build partnerships,' Chopra said. 'We continuously threw wickets [away] in clusters early on, and we have had two or three run outs in every match. After that we have been moving backwards. We need more preparation and more discipline.'