Bittersweet feeling for UAE hat-trick hero
Published:Wednesday | October 19, 2022 | 12:12 AM
BORN IN Chennai, India, and developed as a cricketer in Abu Dhabi and Dubai since his early teenage years, Karthik Meiyappan produced a moment to remember at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 yesterday.
It was a “magical piece of bowling” that wrote Karthik Meiyappan into the history books as he took a stunning hat trick against Sri Lanka, ripping through the middle order and sealing the feat with a turner right through the gate to scatter Dasun Shanaka’s timbers.
Brett Lee, Kagiso Rabada, Curtis Campher, Wanindu Hasaranga and now Meiyappan, only five men’s players in the history of the game have taken a hat trick at an ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.
And few hat tricks in the game can have been of a higher quality than Meiyappan’s.
There had never previously been a hat trick for UAE in T20 Internationals, and Meiyappan’s performance earned him praise from ICC pundit and former Sri Lanka player Russell Arnold.
“He was bowling well right through, the wrong’un none of the batters picked,” Arnold said.
“It was the Sri Lankan middle order, so these are good batters, not the tail… and he just bamboozled them. It was a really, really good spell that restricted Sri Lanka to 150 rather than what could have been 180.”
Despite Meiyappan’s 3/19 off four overs, Sri Lanka’s restricted 152/8 still proved too much for UAE’s batters, who crumbled to 73 all out.
Two defeats, and the significant margin of this loss, mean that UAE’s World Cup campaign is effectively over, with Namibia to come in their last Group A match.
And that has left Meiyappan with a bittersweet feeling.
Proud moment
“It still hasn’t sunk in, the fact I got a hat trick in a T20 World Cup and the first (UAE) bowler to do so. It really is a proud moment, amazing,” he said. “But it would have been much sweeter, much better if we had won the game tonight.
“Obviously making the team to be in the World Cup was an achievement in itself, but the main goal was to play the Super 12s. As of now I think, going forward for us, it would be the 2023 World Cup in India. That’s what we’ll be prepping up for.”
After a performance and a magical moment like this one, the future is certainly bright for young Meiyappan.