Bangladesh

Bangladesh v West Indies – no-one will get credit for a win

When a losing team plays another losing team, one of them has to lose. No-one wins.

This is good though. It’s like life. Life is an ongoing damage limitation exercise that is ultimately doomed to failure. You try your best, you slave away, you constantly improve yourself and the best you can hope for is that you won’t be ridiculed for how badly you have failed.

If the West Indies win, it is ‘only Bangladesh’. If Bangladesh win, it is because of the slow implosion of Caribbean cricket. The important thing is that when it’s all over, no-one is particularly happy.

Faith, facts and failure in Test cricket

Faith is what you need when you don’t have facts. More accurately, faith is what you resort to when you don’t have facts – ‘need’ isn’t the right word. Faith is a way of sticking your head in the sand and even when you’re looking for something at the beach, that’s rarely a productive pastime.

The pertinent fact regarding Bangladesh is this: most of their players are 24. This explains their miss-and-hit-and-miss Test efforts to some degree, but it increasingly seems to us that not a year goes by without all of their ages going up. Not one year. Not one, single year.

We’ll never resort to faith when backing Bangladesh, which is why we’ve wavered a bit after they lost a Test match to Zimbabwe. The 4-0 one-day series win over New Zealand is still fresh enough in our mind that we’ll forgive them this blemish, but it would be good if they could help their own cause a little more.

Sometimes it feels like being a real die-hard fan of a band who you always thought had a lot of promise. You keep going to the gigs, you convince yourself there’s still a spark, but eventually you find yourself in Fibbers in York and there’s nine people in the audience.

As you’re walking into the toilet before the band have gone on, the lead singer walks out and says: “You’re not going for a shit are you mate? Only I’ve pissed all over the seat.”

It is at that moment that you finally accept that the promise was only ever a fleeting illusion.

Another reason to love Tamim Iqbal

What is Bill Gates best known for?

If you answered ‘being the happiest man in the world’ then have 100 points and go and sit with Tamim Iqbal.

Speaking about his Lord’s hundred after he was named one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year, Tamim said:

“I was the happiest man in the world – happier than Bill Gates.”

If Zimbabwe are ‘woeful’ what are Bangladesh?

Cricinfo have a headline describing Zimbabwe as ‘woeful’ after they were bowled out for 162 by New Zealand. However, Bangladesh were bowled out for 58 against West Indies. And they were at home.

Cricinfo’s editorial staff really need to get together and establish an adjective hierarchy. Like most people, we rate all events that happen in our life according to the Premier Manager II scale, which runs as follows:

• Fair (one to five stars)
• Good (one to five stars)
• Very Good (one to five stars)
• Superb
• Outstanding
• World Class
• Exceptional
• The Ultimate

But as you can see, there are obvious flaws in this system. We can go out and have a great meal, musing over our brandy whether it was ‘world class’ or ‘exceptional’, but what if we contract dysentry and the waiter punches us in the kidney? ‘Fair *’ seems rather generous in that situation.

We need an improved scale for evaluating poor performance and if Premier Manager II lets you down, where do you turn?

Maybe people could turn to the comments section of a post on kingcricket.co.uk…

Why a Bangladesh series win is great news

One of the more interesting one-day series has just finished with Bangladesh emerging 4-0 winners over New Zealand.

There are two types of people when it comes to gauging Bangladesh’s progress: the people who look at the scorecards and the people who look at the results.

Those of us in the first group have been monitoring a side that’s been scoring runs more and more consistently and which has had impressive contributions in losing causes from more and more players. Beating New Zealand 4-0 will help the second group see what we already know. Bangladesh are improving all the time.

This is great news because cricket has several nations operating on the breadline at the minute and there simply aren’t enough countries playing the sport that we can afford to lose them.

New Zealand themselves often seem a couple of injuries away from becoming a first-class side, but somehow they always keep it together. They have few stars, but no opponent assumes that they’ll beat them, least of all in one-day cricket. Bangladesh’s victory was no mean feat, particularly without the main man, Tamim Iqbal.

England finally lose to Bangladesh

That’s that out of the way then. Up until yesterday, England had won every match they’d ever played against Bangladesh. Not any more.

Is it a good thing that Bangladesh won? Unquestionably. Why? Well some of our friends were at the match in Bristol yesterday and one pointed out that this match was infinitely more entertaining than last year’s one-day international against West Indies – a day-nighter that never saw night.

That’s it in a nutshell. Sport is about competition. This individual match was closely competed, the result means the series as a whole will be close and it also means Bangladesh cricket is more competitive in broader terms.

And don’t anyone dare say “it’s the kick up the arse England needed to keep them from complacency”. England weren’t complacent. They were beaten.

Tamim Iqbal is in good Test form

Tamim Iqbal has passed 50 in nine of his last 11 Test innings. Considering how he tends to start his innings – hacking away at every ball like he’s a Thracian gladiator de-limbing adversaries – that’s pretty remarkable.

Virender Sehwag is probably a role model, but with Sehwag, you rarely feel like he’s going to get out. It’s clinical destruction. Tamim Iqbal has a lot of shots, but he’s also got a bit of Steve Harmison the batsman in him.

Bangladesh v England – no protagonist, no narrative, no cephalopods

Good films come in two forms:

1. The writers are smarter than you and have constructed an ingenious plot where the story slowly unfolds, keeping you rapt
2. The writers are far stupider than you and haven’t a clue about plot structure, so just to keep things moving, every now and again they introduce an octopus with wings or a robot with no face that always feels disappointed

In both those cases, you have no idea what’s going to happen next, so you pay attention. In between those two extremes are films where you can predict everything that’s going to happen after about the first two minutes. Most films are like this and you basically just watch them unfold, exactly as you expect them to.

The Bangladesh v England Test series threatened drama, but delivered virtually none. England won 2-0 and had to work quite hard. This wasn’t an enormous surprise.

More faceless robots crippled by perpetual disappointment!

Tamim Iqbal – Bangladesh’s best batsman

It’s been good to get to know the Bangladesh players a bit better these last few weeks. There are a handful who stand out and others who seem interchangeable.

Shakib al Hasan’s their best bowler and bats reasonably well. Mahmudullah is looking good so far. Mushfiqur Rahim is a very talented batsman and a gash wicketkeeper – which puts him on a par with most international glovemen. However, the player who’s really stood out has been Tamim Iqbal.

Tamim Iqbal is a vicious opening batsman, but not irresponsibly so. Considering that it was only today that he turned 21, he’s pretty sophisticated.

It was all-out attack as he hit 85 off 71 balls against England today, but he showed during his one-day hundred against the same opponents a couple of weeks ago that he can drop down a gear and not get carried away. Since his first Test hundred, which he scored against the West Indies last year, he’s passed 50 in half of his Test innings.

Imagine what his average would be if he’d played a few Tests against Bangladesh.

Naeem Islam and his high-step

It’s a great era for run-ups. As well as Friedel de Wet’s bunny-hop, we also have Naeem Islam’s high-step.

Just as he’s about to enter his delivery stride, his right leg suddenly tries to knee him in the face. It’s ace.

We can only assume that Naeem Islam learnt to bowl on a pitch inhabited by a mole who would leap from the ground from that exact point and always at that exact moment. Naeem Islam would thus have developed the high-step as a means of bypassing the mischievous subterranean mammal.