ICC World Cup 2019: Ranking the death-overs bowling of all teams
The Cricket World Cup 2019 is set to get underway in a couple of days as the last round of warm-up matches are to take place today. The teams have been preparing for this tournament well in advance and hosts England go into the tournament as favorites while Australia, India and South Africa are strong contenders as well.
With the wickets set to support batsmen and 300+ being the par score on most of the grounds, containing the batsmen during the death overs, where they usually tend to go big will be the priority. The death bowling of each side becomes very crucial this tournament because even if they lose their cool for one ball during the death overs, the match might slip out of hand.
However, not all teams are well prepared of how to bowl to oppositions during death overs and on that note, let's rank the death-overs bowling of each team.
#10 West Indies
The West Indies have a long line of fast bowlers but none of them have been efficient bowling in the death. Apart from skipper Jason Holder and Shannon Gabriel, none of the pacers even have a decent economy rate in T20Is and haven't done much to speak of as far as death bowling is concerned.
Andre Russell and Carlos Brathwaite are very expensive and so is Sheldon Cottrell. Oshane Thomas has good pace but doesn't have the experience to do it on a daily basis and unfortunately, they don't have a mystery spinner or a part-timer to do the job either.
West Indies have a couple of recognized players who are neat with their bowling but no bowler who has consistently bowled in the death and are short on death bowlers.
#9 Afghanistan
Afghanistan have little or no recognized death bowlers in their side. While their spin trio of Mohammad Nabi, Rashid Khan, and Mujeeb Ur Rahman are pretty economical throughout the innings, it will not be viable to operate in the death overs only using spinners. Despite their fine performance against Pakistan in the warm-up fixtures, their pacers were pretty expensive and aren't well versed in the art of death bowling.
While Rashid or Mujeeb can certainly function as a last resort but to consistently bowl the 10 overs, Afghanistan need their pacers to up their game.
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