National cricket captain Rohit Paudel said on Friday that his side got invaluable experience during Nepal’s World Cup Qualifier campaign even though they failed to achieve the outcome they expected in the tournament.

“We did not get the results we expected in the Qualifier, but we got opportunities to learn a lot of things,” said Paudel upon the team’s arrival at the Tribhuvan International Airport Friday morning. The Paudel-led Nepal team finished eighth in the 10-team World Cup Qualifier which sent top two teams – Sri Lanka and the Netherlands – for the World Cup scheduled for October and November, in India.

Nepal’s only victory in their group stage game came against the United States of America, while they lost to hosts Zimbabwe, West Indies and the Netherlands, finishing fourth in Group ‘A’. They failed to earn the mandatory requirement of finishing in the top three to progress to the second round – the Super Six stage.

They beat the United Arab Emirates in the seventh place playoff semi-final, but lost a close contest to Ireland in the seventh place playoff.

Paudel said that the experience they gained could be crucial in shaping their future. “It is not so easy playing against full member (Test) teams. Every department – bowling, batting and fielding – must be good when playing against them,” said Paudel.

“We will be playing in the ACC Emerging Team Asia Cup, Asia Cup and the Asian Games in the near future. We need to apply those things which we learnt in the Qualifier and I hope we could do much better,” he added.

Sharing his experience of playing against Test sides (Zimbabwe and West Indies) for the first time, Paudel said: “Every player was too excited before playing against the Test teams. But when we faced them, although there was not much difference in terms of skills, they were more experienced than us and they did well,” he said. “If we get a chance to play regularly against them, we could beat them in future. We lacked awareness at crunch time and we could learn from there.”

Nepal’s coach Monty Desai said that the team experienced some proud moments during the Qualifier. “The opening partnership in the first match against Zimbabwe,” said the Indian coach referring to Kushal Bhurtel and Aasif Sheikh’s 171-run first wicket partnership. “Karan KC’s brilliant spell against the US, Sandeep (Lamichhane) and Gulsan’s (Jha) partnership against Ireland,” he added, counting the takeaways from the tournament.

He was also full of praise for his captain Paudel. “The young captain managing the team in a very rational and logical way was another highlight of the tournament. We were not just looking to win but also to grow together as a team,” said Desai.

Lamenting the team results, Desai said: “We did not get the exact result which we were looking forward to, getting one more win and making it to Super Six ……. but, we need to keep in mind where we started five months back. Going into the tournament, we knew the conditions would be different and we needed to adapt to those conditions. We even did that in different phases.”

In the period between February 14 to March 16, Nepal won 11 of the 12 One-Day International (ODI) games during ICC World Cup League 2, earning an automatic berth for World Cup Qualifier.