Bangladesh will face Nepal in their second match in the ICC World T20 tournament at Chittagong on Tuesday.
The two teams go back a long way, all the way back to 1996 when Nepal played their first ever cricket match, when both of them were Associate Nations. During the ACC Trophy in Kuala Lumpur that year, Nepal lost to their World T20 Group A opponents by a margin of a faster run-rate.
Their paths have crossed at other levels of cricket: Under-15s, Under-17s, Under-19s, Under-21s, their women’s teams as well as the blind cricket teams of the two nations. But that ACC Trophy game was of utmost significance as it happened 50 years after the Cricket Association of Nepal was formed, and started their journey.
Paras Khadka was too young to remember the particulars of that game but like most cricket fans in Nepal, they have followed the Bangladesh team on TV.
“We have watched every player on TV and now we are playing against them,” Khadka said. “So we are looking forward to it. We get all the TV channels that you get here. More than pressure, it is an opportunity. We should not be thinking too much about being explosive. We should take it nice and slow, build it up.”
