Malta’s participation at this year’s European Championship Division Two got off to a poor start in Mechelen, Belgium, yesterday when the national team lost to Greece by 30 runs in their first match from the group qualifying stages.

Malta won the toss and elected to field first but the heavens opened up and the game had to be reduced from 20 overs to ten.

Mike Caruana was successful from the first ball he bowled, John Grima taking the catch.

The next wicket took a lot more work, however, as a 50-run partnership between Anastasios Mano-usis and Georgios Stogianos had the Malta team worried.

Ronnie Sacco broke that partnership, taking both wickets.

Caruana added a late wicket while Andy Naudi was involved in two run-out efforts, one assisted by Andy Lenard and the other by Grima.

The Greeks totalled 98 runs.

Malta’s reply started off well with Nowell Khosla and Justin Brooke on 17 runs from the first two overs.

However, disaster struck there-after for the Malta team as in the third over Brooke was bowled after getting an inside edge while Khosla was run out the very next ball following a direct hit after having chalked up 11 runs.

Andy Lenard was bowled a couple of balls later and the Malta team did not really recover after that.

Caruana, 13 runs from nine balls, and Darren Grech, 14 from 13 balls, were the other main contributors as the national team only managed 68 runs from their allotted overs.

Mehmoud Ahmed was the main wicket-taker with three.

Today, Malta play their second match against Spain who started off by beating Sweden by five wickets yesterday.

Tomorrow, the national team will figure in a double header in Ghent when facing Austria in the morning and Sweden later on in the day.

Belgium will be Malta’s last op-ponents in Group B, in Brussels, on Thursday.

Group A is composed of Finland, Cyprus, Isle of Man, Luxembourg and Portugal.

Two teams are promoted at the end of the tournament. Classifi-cation matches are scheduled for Friday and Saturday.