“But it’s not only him. The whole group has a few things. Like Ali [Khan], we played him today, but he’s also not 100%. Slowly, I’m hoping that things will get better for the next game.”
Gous has T20 pedigree behind him, having played in the CPL (211 runs from eight innings), the PSL (142 runs from six innings), the ILT20 (524 runs from 17 innings) and MLC (511 runs from 24 innings). Two months ago, he hit a century in a playoff match for Desert Vipers against MI Emirates. That 120 not out off 58 balls is the highest individual score across four seasons of the ILT20.
“Sai is one of the best players we have,” Dassanayake said. “It’s just that last game, I couldn’t play him because of the balance of the team. But he is 22 years old [will be this April]. He learned the game in the USA. He is a USA product. And we are proud to put him in the field. You saw how good he is today. He is the future of the USA cricket basically.”
“Unfortunately, the schedule is in such a way that we had to play the two big countries first and then come into the Associates. So today’s game, the Netherlands game basically, is a message to everyone that how far we are above the rest of the Associate countries. And this is a team that deserves to play more against Full Members.”
“We were able to play five games against Sri Lanka A and one game against Oman and then two warm-up games,” Dassanayake said. “That’s only the leading up to this World Cup. I just want to thank ICC as well. They were behind us in the last couple of months, helping us to get through our programmes and last-minute adjustments. But all these things have come from that one month push in Sri Lanka. Basically, we cannot even compare to any Full Member country how they do and what we have done.”