Kemar Roach
Bangladesh lost their second match in the tournament against West Indies in their third face-off in the tournament. This Group B match which was played in the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium, Mirpur was not as per expected given Bangladesh’s performance in its previous two matches.
Bangladesh won the toss and elected to bat first. Tamim was dismissed of the third ball by Roach with no score on the board for Bangladesh. Kayes soon followed in the fourth over with 16 runs on the board for the home team. The trio of Roach, Benn and Sammy picked up wickets in regular intervals and Bangladesh was all out for 58 runs – their lowest total in ODI matches.
It was much too an easy target for West Indies and they chased it down in 12.2 overs having lost the lone wicket of Devon Smith. Chris Gayle completed his 8000th run in ODI cricket in this match. Perhaps the only bowler from the Bangladeshi side to have done some damage was Naeem Islam who took one wicket and gave 14 runs in the six overs he bowled. That was the only salt that could have been added to the cake walk presented to the West Indies batsmen.
Although Bangladesh would have had expected to do well with the bat as they did against India, their failure to cross the three digit mark was inexplicable. In the words of Bangladeshi captain Shakib- Al-Hasan “I don’t know [what went wrong], we have a lot of things to work on now. We have to sit down and think about it. Hopefully we’ll come back strongly as there are three more games. If we want to qualify for the second round, we have to win two out of three. It is still very much possible.”
Chris Gayle was pretty reasonable in his comments, saying that “I think this win will take us to the quarter-final but we still can’t relax as we have couple of crucial games coming up.”
West Indies have so far registered two wins having lost one match against South Africa. They still have to play against India , Ireland and England. Given the fact that four teams qualify to the next round from each group it becomes quite imperative for each of the teams to win at least 4 matches to be on the safe side. Thus the matches against the three teams would carry much weightage as to which team qualifies to the next round.
Kemar Roach was awarded the Man of the Match award for his bowling figures of 3/19 in 6 overs.
Tags: Bangladesh, Cricket, ICC World Cup, Kemar Roach, Man Of The Match, Mirpur, Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium, West Indies
