Posted by With hindsight, maybe England should have picked more right-handers. None of their left-handed batsmen passed 20, while all of their right-handers did, bar Steven Finn. Quite why people think it’s acceptable to do things left-handed is beyond us.
Bangladesh are working their way into a strong position. This is no mean feat when you consider they lost nine wickets for 49 in their first innings. If only the first of those nine had come just a little bit sooner. Tamim Iqbal’s first innings appears to be growing in size by the session as everything else shrinks around it.
Six years on and Tamim remains Bangladesh’s best batsman (against England, at any rate). He is, of course, a left-hander. Maybe England’s cack-handers should have just played better.
I think it might be as much to do with Mehedi’s precocious talent bowling off-spin with the new/newish ball.
It will be very interesting to see how Mehedi’s talent develops as players/coaches start to devise methods for him and/or if that talent translates onto other types of pitches around the world.
Sooner than that, it will be interesting to see whether “Our Ashwin” can do similar in India over the next six or seven weeks. If he can, England are toast.
But several of the England lefties have played “Our Ashwin” well in the past.
Meanwhile, if England can take some early wickets in the morning, this match could be yet another humdinger between England and Bangladesh…
…and if Bangladesh win it, that sets the series up brilliantly for the decider…
…what do you mean, “there’s no decider”?…
…since when was two matches sufficient for a series?
Another cracking Test, this. Hope Bangladesh catches the Test fever too.
I was going to append a comment here to the tune of “oh dear, hope England cruising to victory in the 4th innings won’t just put them off back to the T20 stuff again” but two wickets fell before I could type it. What a swingy-this-way-and-that series. Drama!
Has Root really got ill from (sort of) licking the ball?
Astonishing. Wonder what the health and safety people have to say.
Oh, Gary. A stodgy 30-40 would have been quite useful in these circumstances! You have to think he’s made himself unselectable for the India tests now.
I would have liked to see Bairstow or Woakes moving up the order to break up the procession of lefties but at this rate they’ll be batting in no time anyway.
Oh dear. What a load of, well, just cack really. Absolute scenes. Remarkable win for Bangladesh. Coming out of both ends of Root? England batsmen coming out of both ends of the pavilion at times… How bad is this? Crisis? Blip? Nz 1999? Gonna be 5-0 in India. Sorry you’re breaking up, got to go.
Not a crisis, as such, because this is no surprise. We’ve known about the lack of spinners in the English game for a few years now and the poor batting against spin is an inevitable byproduct of that.
England are just reaping the rewards of a decade of county greentops against a side which now has enough quality players that it can go for wins instead of draws.
It’s a good thing England have such a strong lower order to prevent catastrophic collapses…
The eternal truth of challenging conditions is that it takes more than two 5/10 batsmen to make the runs of one 10/10 batsman.