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Nepal Defeat Japan U16s

  • 2025-06-24
  • Other news

The men’s Japan Under 16 National Team were shown the standard to aspire to when they came up against defending champions Nepal in the East Zone Cup in Kuala Lumpur.

Nepal, who are regular winners of this competition, had the better of the contest from first to last at the KTJ Oval, earning a win by nine wickets.

Although Japan won the toss and chose to bat, they were unable to build on the excellent batting performance against Bhutan with the step up in quality from the bowling apparent.

Hugo Tani-Kelly played some attractive drives, including one glorious shot to the fence in the opening over, but fell trying to repeat the trick shortly afterwards against opening bowler Abhay Yadav.

The same bowler was too quick for Kaisei Kobayashi-Doggett as well, pinning the centurion from the previous match LBW in his fourth over.

Although captain Charlie Hara-Hinze showed some fight with a counter-attacking 36 from 48 balls, it was fellow left-arm spinner Shubham Khanal who undid the middle order taking five for 15 in his ten overs as Nepal restricted Japan to 80 all out in the 35th over.

The total never felt like enough against such a quality outfit, and while Kobayashi-Doggett drew a false shot from Joy Thapa to give Japan an early breakthrough, Prashiddha Jaishi (37*) and Shiwansh Bajgain (38*) did enough to steer Nepal to the total in the 15th over to wrap up the win.

Japan are next in action against Singapore on Thursday, in a must win game for both teams if they want to progress to the Semi-Finals.

HIGHLIGHTS

The full match schedule is as follows: 

  • 22nd June (Sunday) 11:00 – Japan vs Bhutan (Japan won by 215 runs)
  • 24th June (Tuesday) 11:00 – Japan vs Nepal (Nepal won by 9 wickets)
  • 26th June (Thursday 11:00 – Japan vs Singapore
  • 1st July (Tuesday) 11:00 – Japan vs Indonesia
  • 3rd July (Thursday) 11:00 – Semi Finals
  • 5th July (Saturday 11:00 – Finals

*Match times are JST

**Matches are 50 overs

All matches will be shown live on the Asia Cricket Council YouTube Channel 

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