England and Sri Lanka had to share the points after their first game at the ICC Women’s World T20 was washed out due to continuous rains in St Lucia on Saturday.
Both teams were scheduled to begin their campaign but they will now have to wait for it. The Group A match was the only one due to be played on Saturday, and the first one hosted by the Darren Sammy National Cricket Stadium in Gros Islet, St Lucia.
With both teams receiving a point each after the washout, England were left frustrated as they were favourites against Sri Lanka. Captain Heather Knight too admitted that the result was not ideal.
“I think it’s frustrating, but I don’t think it’s too much of a setback. It is what it is. We’ll obviously split the points with Sri Lanka and we’re hopeful we can get a game with Bangladesh on Monday. We’re obviously desperate to get our tournament going, but today it’s obviously not to be. We’ve just got to be ready when it comes,” Knight said. “Every game in this tournament is a must-win, and if it happens that we’re obviously going into those final games, I think we’ll just be glad to get out there and play some cricket, and the fact that we must win is just by the bye”.
England will now take on Bangladesh on Monday followed by Sri Lanka’s second game of the tournament against South Africa on the same day.
“We have three matches next week. Hopefully we can win one or two matches, and we can go to the semifinals. The last couple of months we trained hard in Sri Lanka, but unfortunately the bad thing is we’ve come here but we can’t play. Our practice (too) is not good because of the weather. We didn’t have nets or indoor nets, so we didn’t train much. But our preparation is really good before the warm-ups, so we trust our potential and our talent,” Sri Lanka captain Chamari said.