Published: Oct 28, 2017, 04:50 PM (IST)
Edited: Oct 28, 2017, 04:50 PM (IST)
Bangladesh‘s winless streak in South Africa continued when they lost the two-match T20I series opener by 20 runs. Opening batsman Soumya Sarkar stated that things would have turned out to be different if someone from No. 3 to 6 could have played a big innings in the last 10 overs. Chasing 196, visitors gave a good fight but were restricted to 175 for 9. Sarkar backed the team management’s ploy of playing with four seamers, and also shed light on ‘dot balls’ to level the series in the penultimate tie on Sunday.
Sarkar opined, “It would have helped us. Then we would have had a set batsman at the crease in the last 10 overs, making things easier for us. They made nearly 200 runs but we also made 175. If one batsman did well in the middle overs, we could have won the game easily. But this (performance) will give us confidence that we can also score 200 runs. Skipper Shakib Al Hasan, Mushfiqur Rahim and Sabbir Rahman fell for 13, 13 and 19 respectively to give away momentum in a crucial phase.
On being asked about playing with 4 bowlers, Sarkar said,”If you want to talk about negative things, there are a lot of things to talk about. If the batsmen did well and we played one less (bowler), you would have said we should have picked one extra bowler. Now that the batsmen couldn’t do the job, you are saying we needed one more batsman. There’s no end to these things; you think that we had one batsman less, but our captain and team management thought this was the best way to go about things.”
Dot ball a sin in shorter formats:
Sarkar added, “Dot balls are a big problem in T20s. We have to reduce that in the next game. Even when we bowled or fielded, we should have saved more runs or not given away the no-ball that went for four. They would have scored 20 runs fewer. Chasing 170-odd would have been a different story.”
