Canada fights back to gain upper hand on Day 1

Geoff Barnett brilliantly caught by Steve Tikolo © ICC

Canada won the toss and elected to bat in their Intercontinental Cup match against Kenya.

The home side quickly got into trouble with a steady flow of wickets falling to brilliant catches in the slips by Kenya's captain Steve Tikolo and behind the stumps by wicket keeper Kennedy Otieno.

Canada's skipper , Jon Davison (10) was followed by newcomers Geoff Barnett (12) and Stewart Heaney (2) all in the first hour of play which ended with the score at 38/3.

Gradually the rebuilding process started with Ashish Bagai contributing 21 and the veteran Pubudu Dassanayake adding 26 in 73 minutes but still Kenya's bowlers were on top as the Canadians stumbled to 95/6. It was not until the session after lunch that the local fans got something to cheer about and their hero was Qaiser Ali.

His support came from the last three batsmen in the order all scoring the same score of 13 but more importantly staying at the other end and watching a masterful innings. Ali faced 160 balls in his marathon innings of 166 minutes consisting of 13 fours. When he finally ran out of partners at 235 he was nine short of his century.

For the visitors Peter Ongondo was the bowler who caused Canada much grief in the morning session taking four wickets for forty nine runs . Even with Ali's heroics the Canadian target should not have posed a problem for the highly ranked Africans and their great batsman and skipper Steve Tikolo .

Qaiser Ali a masterful 91 * to save Canada © ICC

As Kenya began their innings the brilliant blue, sun filled skies over Maple Leaf Cricket Club suddenly changed to dark thunderclouds, but one can hardly blame the conditions for some of the shot selections displayed by Kenya's top four. Henry Osinde and Umar Bhatti, Canada's opening bowlers proved, at least in this session, why some consider them to be among the best opening attack of all the Associates.

At the end of just 8.1 overs, interrupted by a 21 minute stoppage for bad light, four wickets fell for the unthinkable score of 14. What must be most pleasing to Canada is the fact that the great Steve Tikolo is one of those four.

Tomorrow's play will answer many questions including how well can Kenya recover from their disastrous start and will Canada begin to get batting right down the line.

Right now Canada seemed to gain the upper hand but if the events of day 1 is any indication of how this match is going to be played ,the outcome will be very difficult to predict.