Nigeria’s quest for a first appearance at the ICC T20 World Cup begins on Thursday (today) in Namibia where the Yellow Greens will take on Kenya in their first game of the 2024 World Cup qualifiers.
The 2024 tournament is billed for the United States and the West Indies from June 4 to 30 with the top-two teams from the series joining South Africa and 13 other countries at the World Cup. Other teams in the series are hosts Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda.
Today’s game will be the seventh meeting between both countries since 2019 and the East Africans lead the head-to-head with five wins to Nigeria’s one.
However, it’s been two years since they last met and the Yellow Greens have made tremendous improvement under Kenyan coach and high-performance manager of the Nigeria Cricket Federation, Steve Tikolo.
Leading Nigeria against his home country, the former Kenyan World Cup star stressed that emotions won’t get in the way of his job.
“I am the head coach and high-performance manager of the Nigeria Cricket Federation, and in case my team is playing against Kenya, I would treat Kenya as my opponent. That’s the nature of sports or any competition,” Tikolo told our correspondent in a recent chat.
