Halliday: New Zealand happy to be boring in chase of victory
Media release
Brooke Halliday revealed she and Sophie Devine planned to play boring cricket after helping to deliver New Zealand’s first win of the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2025.
Halliday made 69 and Devine (63) notched her third straight fifty as the White Ferns set Bangladesh 228 to win in Guwahati.
With the hot conditions sapping energy, Devine and Halliday planned to focus on singles and tire out the Bangladesh fielders before transferring to big shots at the back end of the innings, which the former succeeded at.
They then bowled Bangladesh out for 127 to complete a first win of the tournament after earlier defeats to Australia and South Africa.
“The biggest thing over the last couple of days was being okay with getting singles and being quite boring,” Halliday said after top-scoring.
“We knew what the plan was, it was to bat for a long time, until the 40th over, and then from there have a bit of a party time. I couldn’t, but Sophie could.
“We have had a lot of net bowlers who bowl similar to what we got today, and we figured out how we were going to play against their bowlers.
“It was not easy to bat out there, the mental side was tough and the physical side hit us towards the end.
“Sophie kept it really simple, and that works for me. What we did today was keep it simple. If we keep doing what we can control, we will go well in Colombo next up.”
For Devine, part of her move away from running singles was to conserve energy as she looked to manager her diabetes while in the middle for another long stint at this World Cup.
She said: “Diabetes was not playing ball, I was running low on sugar and tried to get in as much sugar with Coke and jelly beans.
“It is just another challenge in these conditions that are already tough enough. I wanted to get off a couple of overs earlier, but Maddy (Green) chewed my ear off asking me to stay on.”
Bangladesh were immediately behind the run rate in their chase after the top order was blown away, with each of the top five falling for four runs or fewer.
Resistance came first from Nahida Akter (17) and then Fahima Khatun (34) and Rabeya Khan (25) as the trend of the middle order scoring fluently at this World Cup continued.
However, for captain Nigar Sultana Joty, who made four from 28 balls at No.3, putting all the pieces together is required if Bangladesh are to get their second win of the tournament to add to their success against Pakistan last week.
She said: “Whatever we have done in the last game, we wanted to do the same good things here.
“We are not being consistent as a batting unit. When you chase 200-plus, and the top order does not click, it is difficult to chase this sort of target.
“There are a lot of things we have to learn from here, definitely. We have seen the lower middle order being the best part of the games because they get the runs and help the team.”
Bangladesh play South Africa next, fresh from a dramatic win over India, while New Zealand head to Colombo to take on Sri Lanka.
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