Willis vowing Hong Kong will ‘work harder, smarter’ in bid to regain elite cricket status

Head coach Simon Willis said Hong Kong had to “work harder and smarter” to keep pace with a “fast-moving cricket landscape”.

Hong Kong’s next major target is success at November’s Cricket World Cup Challenge League in Uganda, with Willis keen for his team to make strides towards recapturing the one-day international status they surrendered in 2018.

They go to the T20 Emerging Teams Asia Cup in Oman next month, too. Before all that, though, Willis is trying to get to the cause of last week’s T20 World Cup qualifying near miss, which left the Englishman nursing a sense of déjà vu.

Hong Kong fatally surrendered a position of strength against hosts Malaysia, before getting a rough deal from the weather gods in their decisive final match with Kuwait. Willis’s side were on top, with only one more over needing to be bowled to constitute a match, when rain forced an abandonment.

Consequently, Hong Kong missed out on reaching next year’s final qualifying stage because of their fractionally inferior net run rate (NRR), having been burned in similar fashion on multiple occasions during Willis’s 18 months in charge.

Willis refused to hide behind the narrow margin of elimination, acknowledging his team “let ourselves down” against Malaysia.