After a clinching win in the 1st T20I, Bangladesh failed to set a target in its second encounter against India and lost by 8 wickets. Mahmudullah, the captain of Bangladesh cricket team, says one of the reasons behind their defeat in the 2nd T20I is their middle-order batting line-up.
He said the openers had given a very good start during the first 10 overs by scoring 83 but their final score was just 153 for the loss of six wickets.
Mahmudullah said. “The openers gave us a very good start and that was a 180 plus wicket. Pitch was very good to bat on, especially when we lost Soumya (Sarkar’s) wicket, there were two new batsmen in the middle, we took a little bit of time and probably cost us the match. We should have got at least a 175-plus score.”
He also said he is not ready to blame any particular batsman, and added, “It is very necessary to have a set batsman till 15-16 overs on this kind of wicket. There should be someone who can carry on and those who are with him, maybe if they can make 20-30 runs, it will help a lot. If you look at India’s batting order, Rohit pulled off the win alone, he has batted really well. If such an innings came from one of our top-order batsmen, we probably would have had a better chance of scoring 170-180 runs.”
Mahmudullah further said, “We played 38 dot balls in the innings. Maybe that’s okay, but there will definitely be opportunities to improve. However, I pointed out that our batsmen had to take more responsibility today… The goal was to get a good score, but we couldn’t do that and it is the failure of our batsmen.”
