Moments before Mushfiqur Rahim announced his resignation as captain, he and his deputy Mahmudullah had blamed the Bangladesh top order for the 1-2 defeat to Zimbabwe. Mushfiqur was among the top five batsmen who hadn’t scored a half-century in the series.Bangladesh had also lost all three tosses, but Mushfiqur said it was a matter of handling the conditions rather than relying on luck. They had gone 1-0 up after the first game in Harare but lost the next two.
“Luck is not everything,” Mushfiqur said. “We are a much better team than how we played in this ODI series but we couldn’t prove it, especially with the bat. None of the top five could score a fifty in the series, which is very disappointing. We regularly lost early wickets, which affected our scoring rate. If we had scored 270 on all three occasions, it would have been a different ball game.
“Obviously that’s [complacent] what they looked like. I wouldn’t say Zimbabwe bowled too badly but we lost early wickets and we went into the last ten overs with only a few wickets in hand. It hampered our performance.”
Mushfiqur, Tamim Iqbal, Shakib Al Hasan and Mohammad Ashraful averaged less than 22 in the series, and Bangladesh often replied on the lower-middle order to bail them out of tough spots. Nasir Hossain and Mahmudullah were the only batsmen to aggregate more than 100 runs in the series.
“I wouldn’t blame the wicket. I would rather say that the top-order didn’t bat well,” Mushfiqur said. “We couldn’t do that well in the first match either. In all three matches, the lower middle-order backed up well.
“I think the toss was also very important, so we also needed some luck. Our target was to bat second, because we are good at chasing totals. But we couldn’t do well with the bat, and hence lost the series.”
(Source: Cricinfo via google news)
