Ahead of their clash against Pakistan in the ICC T20 World Cup 2024, Ireland coach Heinrich Malan expressed his feelings about the ongoing mega event saying that this tournament has gone pretty weird so far. Ireland is currently placed last in Group A, with just one point out of three matches they have played in the ongoing tournament so far. They have already failed to qualify for the Super Eights of the ongoing marquee event. In their last group stage match of the competition, the Irish team will go up against the Men in Green at the Central Broward Regional Park Stadium Turf Ground in Lauderhill, Florida on Sunday.

The Ireland coach asserted that the team has not trained at all since they have been down in Florida last week.

“We’ve been quite lucky. We played them a couple of weeks ago back home in Ireland. It’s been a challenge from a preparation point of view. We haven’t trained at all since we’ve been down in Florida the last week, so I mean, that is what it is. We’ve been having our unit meetings and our preparation meetings and just going over some of those plans that we’ve managed to execute pretty well back home and won the first game. We can piggyback on, that for a little longer period and hopefully, we can go well again tomorrow,” Malan said in the pre-match press conference.

The Irish coach further stated that the management has tried to keep the team busy.

“It’s been a pretty weird World Cup, as you say. Yeah, look, we’ve tried to keep the lads busy as much as we can, obviously doing our preparation and our analytics work in the background, and just keep them active physically. The boys are at the minute playing a bit of soccer and trying to just get the competitive juices flowing as well leading into tomorrow,” Malan added.

Squads:

Pakistan Squad: Mohammad Rizwan (wk), Babar Azam (c), Usman Khan, Fakhar Zaman, Imad Wasim, Shadab Khan, Iftikhar Ahmed, Shaheen Afridi, Naseem Shah, Haris Rauf, Mohammad Amir, Abrar Ahmed, Saim Ayub, Azam Khan, Abbas Afridi.

Ireland Squad: Paul Stirling (c), Mark Adair, Ross Adair, Andrew Balbirnie, Curtis Campher, Gareth Delany, George Dockrell, Graham Hume, Josh Little, Barry McCarthy, Neil Rock, Harry Tector, Lorcan Tucker, Ben White, Craig Young.

Ireland vs Sri Lanka, T20 World Cup Warm-Up Highlights© AFP

Ireland vs Pakistan 3rd T20I: Pakistan won the series.© X (Twitter)