Russell Domingo, the head coach of Bangladesh, believes that their team’s “frustrating” and frequent errors lost them in the ODI series against Zimbabwe.
In order to defeat Bangladesh by five wickets on Sunday and win the ODI series with one match remaining, Zimbabwe put up a strong run chase for the second time in three days.
After losing early wickets, Zimbabwe recovered to chase 291 with 15 balls remaining, defeating a poor scoring rate. With a fifth-wicket stand of 201 runs, Sikandar Raza and Regis Chakabva reversed the tide and helped the host nation win the series for the first time since 2013. Sikandar and Innocent Kaia then orchestrated a spectacular comeback. Zimbabwe had made a similar effort in the initial game as they chased down nearly 300 runs despite faltering at one stage in the contest.
”As a coach and as management, it’s very frustrating to see the mistakes because we seem to be making them more regularly than we should. We talked about it and we are trying to work on it but then under pressure players seem to make the same mistake and that is an area of concern for us,” After the second game in Harare, Domingo informed the media.
“In both games, they were 16 for 3 and 40 for 4 and then boys just didn’t deal with the pressure well enough. Too many softballs, too many balls bowled to the wrong field and wrong options are taken. Boys are trying but they are not learning quickly and they are making the same mistakes over and over again.
It’s a disappointing thing. They are trying hard but they are just not learning from their mistakes and keep making the same mistakes over and over and good teams and good players gonna punish you under these conditions. They are punished by four really good hundreds in the last two games.”
According to Domingo, the main difference between the two sides was their inability to build strong partnerships, and they were never careless when facing the hosts.
”No complacency at all. We have been talking about how dangerous this particular side is and last year we won the series 3-0 but there were really two tight games and we won the T20Is 2-1, so complacency never came into it,” commented the South African.
”We haven’t got any hundreds we have got a lot of the 50s and lot of 40s but nobody batted long enough and got that big partnership.
”Some great lessons for us coaching staffs and for the players with World Cup still year and a half away. Fortunately, these games don’t count for points so we got to see that as a great learning experience because we got outplayed in these last two games,” he said.
According to Domingo, Zimbabwe deserves praise for outperforming Bangladesh in both games.
”I think you got to give credit to Zimbabwe and Sikandar in particular as he played fantastically well. Two of the better one-day hundreds you will find under pressure. Look we probably know we left 20 runs out yesterday, maybe 20 runs out today… we could have got more and it’s very difficult to defend in the afternoon Zimbabwe thoroughly deserve the win and they outplayed us on both days. No excuses,” said Domingo.
”They have got a batter (Sikandar) who is in the form of his life. He is playing as good as any international player I have seen even in the T20Is, he played in the qualifier and he played two unbelievable games and some of the younger players like Regis and others are maturing now and getting more experience and getting a bit more knowhow about how to win games. They got a bit more structure in their batting line-up and they cleared the boundary in the middle. They also played spin a lot better than we played and that is the biggest plus factor for them,” he said.
