Nigeria Women’s cricket team, the Female ‘Yellow-Greens’ will depart the country today for the International Cricket Council (ICC) Women’s T20 World Cup Africa Qualifier taking place in Uganda between December 9 and 17 at the Entebbe Cricket Oval.
Currently ranked 30th in the world, the Nigerian ladies will be hoping to pick one of the two tickets at stake during the event.
The qualifiers will feature eight teams that have been divided into two groups. Group A has Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Botswana, and Kenya, while Nigeria will feature in Group B, alongside Rwanda, Namibia and hosts Uganda.
Coach of the female Yellow-Greens, Leke Oyede, said the team camped at the Cricket High-Performance Centre at Edo Boys’ High School in Benin City for the better part of the last six weeks, and he believes the players are primed for the qualifiers.
“The players have the benefit of being together for a long time and the coaches have put in a lot of work to address the weaknesses that we observed from their last outings. So, we are going to Uganda assured of better performance when compared with our outings earlier in the year.”
Coach Oyede listed the team’s long serving captain, Blessing Etim, as the leader of the pack. Other members in the squad include: Sunday Salome, Esther Sandy, Lucky Piety, Victory Igbinedion, Favour Eseigbe and Christabel Chukwuonye.
Sarah Etim, Abigail Igbobie, Lilian Udeh, Rukayat Abdulrasaq, Peculiar Agboya, Adekunle Adeshola and Rachael Samson also made the team.
Nigeria’s opening match will be against Namibia on Sunday, December 10th, 2023, by 9:30am local time.
The female national team had won the five-nation NCF Women’s T20i Invitational earlier in the year. The event featured, Rwanda, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and host Nigeria.
