LA­HORE, Pak­istan – West In­dies women’s coach Shane Deitz was full of praise for his team’s re­silience, fol­low­ing their hard-fought three-wick­et win over Bangladesh in their ICC World Cup qual­i­fi­er in La­hore on Thurs­day.

On the back of an ex­cel­lent bowl­ing dis­play led by Aaliyah Al­leyne who bagged four wick­ets, and some pow­er hit­ting by Chinelle Hen­ry, who scored a half cen­tu­ry, Deitz says the team is dis­play­ing the brand of crick­et that he knows they can con­jure up, and he was par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased with the ef­fort from the Bar­ba­di­an Al­leyne who vir­tu­al­ly set up the match for the re­gion­al side.

“We knew if we bowled in good ar­eas, we’ve got the bowl­ing at­tack and the field­ing ex­per­tise to re­strict them. “We start­ed well, then they got away from us a bit, but then Dou­ble A (Aaliyah Al­leyne) came back and bowled prob­a­bly the best spell I’ve seen from any­one for the West In­dies since I’ve been here. It was in­spi­ra­tional, fast, ac­cu­rate, and hos­tile. As the bowl­ing coach said, she brought the mus­tard, she bowled with good pace and was just so ag­gres­sive. She want­ed to win the game and changed it sin­gle-hand­ed­ly.”

Al­leyne’s fiery spell dis­man­tled Bangladesh’s mid­dle or­der, re­strict­ing them to 227 all out. In re­ply, the West In­dies bat­ting line­up held firm de­spite ear­ly wob­bles, with Hen­ry’s com­posed un­beat­en 51 steer­ing them home at 228 -7 in 46 overs.

“Chin (Chinelle Hen­ry )brought it home with some big hit­ting, which we know she can do, but she had some clever bat­ting as well and knocked the ball around in the gaps and hit when she got the ball in her area. So that was a mag­nif­i­cent in­nings from her to bring the team home.”

With one group game re­main­ing against Thai­land, West In­dies cap­tain Hay­ley Matthews em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of fin­ish­ing strong.

“We need to rest up and re­cov­er to­mor­row, get our­selves back in a good men­tal space. “We’re tak­ing a lot of con­fi­dence from this game, but we un­der­stand the im­por­tance of the last match. We want to win it, but the net run rate will come in­to play if we want to qual­i­fy. Hope­ful­ly, we can go out there and win con­vinc­ing­ly.”

CMC