Bangladesh head coach Chandika Hathurusingha said on Tuesday that their top-order is a concern but urged patience with the new-look opening pair.
Bangladesh have opted for Litton Kumar Das and Tanzid Hasan Tamim to open the innings in the World Cup after Tamim Iqbal made himself unavailable, but the opening pair has failed to impress thus far, adding 19 runs against Afghanistan and 14 runs against England. It hurt the team even more in Dharamsala, where they were playing with six bowlers in the Playing XI.
“If you don’t get a start, if you lose more than three wickets early in the Powerplay, you’re not winning many matches. So definitely it’s a concern. We need to, because when we play seven batters also, we want our top-order to fire. So that’s a big concern,” Hathurusingha told reporters after the game in Dharamsala on Tuesday.
“It is a concern, we’ve not been scoring (as an opening pair) but then Litton coming into form this game was a good positive for us and then Tanzim scored runs in the two practice games so he was in form. So, there are two failures. In the World Cup, it can happen for any team. So, I’m hoping those two, those guys will fight because most of the batters now got into form. And in the coming games, hopefully, we’ll perform as a group,” he said, adding that they need to be patient with Tanzid.
“You’re right, he (Tanzid) got out two times. But he was in the runs in the two practice games. He is just getting into international cricket. If you judge someone with two innings, then Malan would not be playing this game as well. So we have to be patient,” he said.
Hathurusingha added that he is disappointed with the performance of their bowling unit which failed to live up to their reputation against England. He added that the bowlers need to understand how to execute their plans in the middle.
“I don’t think we made a mistake by bowling first because the wicket had something. And especially it’s a 10:30 start, and then yesterday, a little bit of rain. There was something on the wicket,” said Hathurusingha.
“The fact was that we did not bowl good areas, our lengths and lines were not good. We were a little disappointed with the way we started. We could have bowled a little bit more onto the stumps, especially in the first 10 overs. We came back well. Especially Shoriful, I thought was very brave to bowl those variations when we were really under pressure. They would have got 400 at one stage I thought. There are some positives but we didn’t bowl well,” he said.
“The fast bowlers were unusually off-colour in the powerplay in the last two games. Normally, in a day game, early on, there is something for the fast bowlers. Even this game, there was seam movement early on, a little bit tacky and two-paced. Two openers were playing and missing, there were mishits, and they were a little bit lucky. After that, they batted really well. So, if we had some early wickets, the story would have been different,” he said.
“The plan was not to bowl outside the stumps, the plan was to bowl at the stumps. I think the execution let us down. This game especially. In the last game, we came back later with the help of the spinners. This game what happened was our spinners did not bring us back into the game due to the good intelligent batting,” he said.