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Four years after we tipped him for greatness, Shakib Al Hasan hit his first Test hundred. New Zealand were on the receiving end and while they won the match, their bowlers took some stick.
After dawdling along on nought for an age, Shakib Al Hasan suddenly engaged the long handle and walloped 40 runs in 13 balls. His hundred eventually took 127 balls, which is pretty remarkable considering the fact that he was on eight after 40 balls.
Playing conditions in New Zealand are as unfamiliar to the Bangladeshis as conditions can get, yet they’re scoring hundreds and improving with every match.
Bangladesh can score runs and take wickets and those two things are coinciding more and more frequently. In home conditions their performance will be a notch better and someone’s going to get it fairly soon.
We have watched our national side for long enough to know that if there’s an embarrassment out there for the taking, England aren’t the kind of side who are going to resist grasping at it. Even now, they’re probably fashioning some sort of net to guarantee they can collect it and add it to their already sizable collection.
KC, I’ve noticed that, in recent times, sub-continental teams have been quite good at performing in NZ and England…seems to be because sub-continental teams are better at coping with a bit of swing rather than bounce…
But, Bangladesh is putting up very encouraging performances and the match-up against England will be pretty tight! 🙂
England are ripe for an upset. And Strauss will come back and “save” them
No need for England to make an embarrassment net. In the same way that Ponting controls cricketing success the world over, someone unnamed in the England camp doles out abject failures against inferior teams with the same wisdom and lack of bias.
Alex – I suspect the unnamed person is Ian Bell.
I desperately, desperately want Bangladesh to embarras the pants off England.
At some stage they will have more than one good batting/bowling performance per innings and they will win a test. Part of me hopes this will happen against England.
If we are shit at what we do, we get fired. Bangladesh, on the other hand, keep finding some consoling voice or the other. Played 64 matches, lost 55 of them. These people are an embarrassment to an international sport.
Bit unkind on Bangladesh, Deep Cower.
The history of this problem, IMHO, is that the ICC got it badly wrong with Sri Lanka, inviting that country to join the top table long after they had proved themselves.
In order to prove that they had learnt from their mistakes, the ICC then invited Bangladesh to play full tests about 5 years too early!! This is not Bangladesh’s fault.
But the continual success of the Bangaldesh U19s for the past few years proves that they beong at the top table now.
We should encourage, not dismiss.
Ged, I am all for encouraging people. Everyone knows that. But Bangladesh have had it easy for too long. They’ve got wonderful fans who love the game, about time the team gave them something to cheer about. With regard to the SL analogy, I have always thought that the ICC did the exact same thing with them too. SL became a test nation in the early 80’s, and they didn’t have any record to speak of till then.
Ged, I don’t understand your point about Sri Lanka at all. They only won two games in their first decade of Test cricket. What they WERE capable of doing, however, was grinding out draws reasonably often. Zimbabwe were the same – regularly beaten early on, but also managing to draw Tests, and even getting the odd win.
That is the sort of level you want from minnows when they enter Test cricket. Bangladesh are perhaps around that level now – they still find it hard to draw, because cricket is played faster today and there are more results. But their losses are often quite respectable. They really need a good bowler apart from Shakib though, someone else who can average around 30.
U/19 success means VERY little, otherwise Nepal would be on the verge of Test status. They were beating Test nations at u/19 level a decade ago, beat NZ and SA in the 2006 u/19 World Cup, and their senior side are now struggling to get out of the World Cricket League division 5.
David, Good point about grinding out draws. Drawing from a tough situation requires collective batsmanship, something that Bangladesh are incapable of, even now. Also, in these modern days, the levels of coaching and infrastructure have improved a lot. I doubt if the Sri Lankan team of the 80’s could have afforded a foreign coach. So, Bangladesh not showing any improvement for ten years now is quite baffling.
To be fair, it seems like, except England, there is no other side in World Cricket that can grind out draws (ref: SA and Ind in their recent series)