Saturday 6 March 2010

England saved!

Finally, England could whitewash Bangladesh who are at present the only team that is showing some sort of improvement compared to all other teams. England has to consider themselves lucky enough so that they have not yet lost to any minnow team like Bangladesh no matter how bad they have been. When England was expected to post a total in excess of 300, they were 16 runs short of the same in the 3rd and the final one dayer at Chittagong. For the first time in the three match tournament, there were as many as 7 sixes in the England innings.

This may also be partly due to underestimating the Bangladesh team to be the same that it was some four years down the lane. Bangladesh have been found to have improved over the years much to anyone's surprise and more so when it comes to their home record though they have not yet tasted success of any sort. In the recently concluded tri series involving Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh, they despite losing all the games that they played, put up a tough fight by bringing the opposition close to 50 overs en route to their successful run chase against Bangladesh.

This was the first time in the series that England batted first. Thanks to Bangladesh who won the toss and chose to field first. It was a good planning from the Bangladeshi side no matter what the result of the match had to say. Eight out of the eleven Bangladeshi batsmen who made it to the crease came out scoring double figured scores. And if the number ten and number eleven batsmen in Shafiul Islam and Rubel Hossain respectively are excluded from the list there was just one batsman whose score was less than 10. Added to this was that Bangladesh didn't lose all ten wickets.

It has now days become a fashion for almost all the teams to bring in 7 to 8 bowlers with just one or two bowlers bowling their complete quota of 10 overs. And the fashion also has its aftermath when most of the captains make wrong decisions by tossing the ball to the wrong bowler who in turn makes a mess not only off his own bowling but also of his team. And, this time also there was a bowler from the England side in Ajmal Shahzad who bowled 9 overs giving away 55 runs at the rate of 6.11 an over.

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