The UAE have booked a trip to the T20 World Cup in Australia after beating Nepal in Muscat.
Ahmed Raza’s side beat their familiar rivals by 68 runs in the semi-final of the qualifying event on Tuesday.
It means the national team will be heading back to the global stage for the first time in seven years, and for just the fourth time in history.
They played at the 50-over World Cup in 1996 and 2015, and have had one previous appearance at the 20-over version, back in 2014.
In the seminal last-four match against Nepal, Muhammad Waseem set the game up with the bat, before – fittingly – captain Raza applied the finishing touches with the ball.
Waseem scored a neatly-paced half-century, then held three catches – one of which was a stunning, diving boundary effort. Raza later took 5-19 to seal the victory.
After winning the toss and opting to bat, UAE reached 175-7 from their 20 overs. They might have hoped for more while Vriitya Aravind was in the midst of his latest tour de force.
A day earlier, the tournament’s leading run-scorer had hauled UAE through to this semi-final with an extraordinary salvo which brought him 24 off the final over against Bahrain.
Straight away against Nepal, he picked up where he had left off. He blazed 46 from 23 balls before playing back to a googly from Sandeep Lamichhane and being bowled.
UAE were on 72-2 midway through the eighth, though. The scoring rate dipped, though, because of fine bowling and canny captaincy from Lamichhane, allied to the fact Mohammed Usman was scratching around for form.
All the while, Waseem was playing a fine hand. The opener had not been quite at his dynamic best to this point in the competition, but he picked the perfect time to fine form.
Waseem made 70 from 48 balls. It included four sixes, one of which caused a pause in the match between Ireland and Oman on the neighbouring field as the square leg-fielder in that game saw the ball bouncing past him.
He fell to the penultimate ball of the 17th over. Without him or Aravind, UAE were unable to apply a late surge to their overs, but 176 was always likely to prove a challenging chase given the pressure of the stakes they were playing for.
The start UAE made to the defence was ideal. Junaid Siddique first trapped Aasif Sheikh in front, then was on a hat-trick after he had Lokesh Bam caught at point by Waseem off the next delivery.
In the next over, he had in-form Kushal Bhurtel caught at the wicket by Aravind. Nepal failed to recover, and Raza ran through the middle-order and tail with five.
This qualification represents an extraordinary rise from the depths of a corruption crisis which ripped through the sport in the emirates in 2019.
From losing seven senior players to spot-fixing related suspension, Raza’s young side have risen right back to the global stage.
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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