Confidence shattered Bangladesh will take on high-flying West Indies tomorrow.
|| CF Correspondent ||
Bangladesh will kick-off their tri-nation series campaign tomorrow at 3.45 PM. The match will be played on the Castle Avenue in Dublin.
Bangladesh made a disappointing start to their Ireland tour by tasting a humiliating 88-run defeat to Ireland Wolves, a second string team of Ireland in their only practice game on Sunday while West Indies crushed hosts Ireland by a mammoth 196 runs to kick-start their campaign emphatically.
The tri-nation series is seen as the perfect preparation platform for both Bangladesh and West Indies as Ireland didn’t qualify to this year’s World Cup but the way West Indies played their tri-nation opener speak volume of their bench strength.
West Indies rewrote the record books on the way to their emphatic victory over the hosts. Their opener Shai Hope and John Campbell put on a 365-run for the opening stand, the biggest in ODI history with Campbell hammering 179 while Hope striking a marvelous 170.
The two sides so far faced off each other 34 times with West Indies still leading the ladder having won 21 matches so far. Bangladesh though won 11 matches, most of them came in the recent time, helping them to leapfrog West Indies in the ICC ODI rankings too. The rest of the two matches produced no result.
All of the West Indies pacer-Sheldon Cotrell, Kemar Roach, Shannon Gabriel-possesses raw and can hit the deck with 150 KM and the pace was something that made the difference in their match against Ireland.
While Irish medium pacers were taken into disdain, the Irish batsmen couldn’t have any answer to the raw of the West Indian fast bowlers and on the other hand Bangladeshi batsmen struggled against the pace of second string Irish attack.
However despite the loss the in the practice game, Bangladesh’s two leading pacers-Taskin Ahmed and Rubel Hossain showed some promise though both of them were expensive.
Skipper Mashrafe Bin Mortaza who didn’t play the practice match is set to lead the side in the match against West Indies. Farhad Reza is likely to pave the way of Mashrafe’s return to the fold.
Pace bowler Mustafizur Rahman is unlikely to play the game given his injury concern, meaning Bangladesh apart from Farhad Reza will go with the same squad that played the practice game against Ireland Wolves on Sunday.
‘’Obviously we had a training camp before hand, not all the squad members were there, they were involved in the fifty over’s game, they got game time there, those guys who weren’t involved we had a training camp for them and then moved here, so I think it’s a good acclimatization, obviously we got a month before the world cup starts, we got a tri series against Ireland and west indies who wont be taken lightly, so its nice to get acclimatized before the big show piece,’’ McKenzie told reporters after the warm-up debacle
