He might have gone wicketless in the previous five matches, but Mudassar Bukhari made it up with a man-of-the-match performance on Monday against England picking up three wickets for twelve runs in 3.4 overs.
Bukhari debuted in 2007 but was contracted as a full time cricketer only in 2011 -- before which he worked in Burger King at Amsterdam airport. "Now I'm one of the full-time contracted players and since that job, I haven't done anything else full time, I've been playing cricket for the Netherlands," said Bukhari. "This is my full time job now. I don't know how long for, with what's going on but hopefully we can get some fixtures to play because this sure beats flipping burgers. It's much better than that, I can tell you that."
Being a contracted player is one thing, but if the likes of Bukhari need to shine in global events, they'll need to have fixtures for a start. The Associate sides lack of big-game experience has come to the fore throughout the World T20 tournament but they have also shown some potential that needs to be nurtured. Netherlands skipper Peter Borren was no less happy about his team's effort, although he sounded concerned about the future of Dutch cricket with minimal sponsorship, loss of ODI status and a lack of international fixtures.
"We have a sponsor in ABN-AMRO and the ICC Associate high performance programme, so long may that funding continue, because at the moment we don't know where it's going for Dutch cricket," Borren said. "We've got nothing this summer, not one fixture, so this will be a nice one to finish on for a while. Hopefully it is sorted out because we're very proud of our effort here.
"We recognise the fact we were representing Associates here. We had to work bloody hard to get here - to become the representative of Associate cricket. And we knew we had to take that role seriously because there were plenty of competitive Associate teams who didn't make it."
Borren didn't want to compare this win to the one in the World T20 in 2009 in Lord's against the same team because he thought this was a more convincing win bowling out England for 88 and winning the match by 45 runs.
"In 2009 it was a big shock but if you look at all the cricket we played here, I don't feel tonight feels like an upset," Borred remarked. "It was, of course an upset, but if you watched all our cricket then you would have thought we'd beat someone so it's not a big surprise.
"When you win by 45 runs in a Twenty20, it isn't really close is it? But we didn't take anything for granted until the fall of that last wicket. It's not a huge run around and rip your shirt off moment like 2009, when we won off the last ball but this one's very, very satisfying and exhilarating I guess."
If it was a pretty satisfying tournament for the Dutch, England share no such feeling about not just this tournament but their entire last few months. Though England's limited-overs coach Ashley Giles thought the Dutch had to be credited for their performance, he was understandably embarrassed after his side's batting order collapsed needing only 134 to win.
"You say I was happy at halftime but I thought we started the game poorly, I thought we were slow in the field and lacked intensity for them to be 47 for 1 after six overs," Giles said. "You know, you can't choose when to turn it on and turn it off and I felt we thought we could today, and 130-odd yes we should get them but every run counts, every ball counts for England.
"The sun will still come up tomorrow but, sometimes it feels like it won't when you have days like that at the office and it wasn't good from anyone. I'm sure they know that, but there is not much more we can say except that it was unacceptable and embarrassing. You can't hide from it, with all due respect to the Dutch, because they played some good cricket in this competition."
