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Bangladesh head coach Chandika Hathurusingha believes their first objective in the upcoming World Cup is  to advance through the group stage.

Bangladesh are placed in Group D along with Sri Lanka, South Africa, Netherlands and Nepal the matches will be played in both the USA and West Indies. The Tigers have to secure three matches to qualify for the Super-8.

"I understand we as a country now, have high aspirations because we have been playing good cricket generally out of ICC events. It's the same. We have high expectation as players and the staff and as well as the fans and the country," said Hathirisingha.

"The first step is to get through this difficult group stage. We are in a very strong group. Then we take, if we get through that one, that's the main target, first one, and then we'll take it from there,"

Bangladesh hosted Zimbabwe in a five-match T20I series as a preparation ahead of the World Cup, they will play another T20Is against the co-host the USA which will be their last assignment prior to the mega event.

Meanwhile, Hathurusingha was satisfied with the team's preparation however, there was a level of uncertainty with some individual performances. The coach believes they have an opportunity to do better than before this time.

"Our preparation, I thought, was very good. We had a good camp in Chattogram and then we played five games against Zimbabwe. So, in those five games, we had the opportunity to give most of the players that we wanted to expose in certain situations, we were able to give them. There's a little bit of concern about some individual performance. But other than that I thought that was a good preparation," he said.

"Yeah, every tournament is an opportunity for us to do better than what we have done before. Yes, T20 cricket has been challenging for us. That shows where we stand in the rankings. So there's no denial. But then we are counting on our preparation to do better than what we have done before," he added.