Cricket World Cup 2011: Performance of BD Tigers !?!

Bangladesh is one of the organizers of Cricket world cup 2011, hosting possibly the most amazing opening ceremony to the world cup ever. One of the privileges of being the host has been to play all of their group matches in home ground. In addition to these group matches, they have also hosted two quarter finals. Being the host country, the expectation of mass population reached new height. These expectations were based on not only to be the host country, but also because of the performance of the Bangladeshi cricket team during the 2010. They played well and won several games, beating sides that are stronger than i.e. the series against New Zealand (one of the semi-finalist of the 2011 WC which was won by 4-0). A consecutive series win against Zimbabwe, proved the country’s cricketing potential. The figure shows the success trend in the year of 2010 where, Bangladesh didn’t manage to win any match in first six months. But during the 2^nd half of the year, their wining ration umpped to100% in October, followed by 75% success in December with 4 and 3 win respectively.  Their current performance coupled with the benefit of playing in the home ground has created sky-high expectation i.e. dream of playing in the semi-finals.

But their dream-run has ended in the first round. Out of six matches, they lost three and won the same number of games. Mathematically the success rate is 50% in this tournament. The table in the left shows their detail batting performance against the teams during the group-level. Their total run is only 999 (on avg. of 166.5). And to get such runs they lost 51 wickets and played 236 over’s. An argument may be in place that against Netherlands they could not get more than 166 due to low target. The argument can be overlooked with: Firstly l, they used up 41 overs (>80%) to reach the target; secondly, they have managed to save only 3 wickets in the rest of the 5 matches indicating they have conceded all the wickets in almost every match (in fact three matches). And finally, being all-out for only 58 & 78 in 18.5 & 28 over respectively against West Indies and South Africa indicates the inconsistence of their performance.

Let’s look into the other face of the coin i.e. bowling. In world cup 2011, Bangladesh bowlers did much better compared to the batsman. In the table in the right, we can see that Bangladesh has bowled out their opponent three times and has picked up 8 wickets against South-Africa & 9 wickets against India. If we exclude their performance against West Indies (as target was only 59), they managed 47 wickets (out of 50) in five matches which is very much impressive. In a different angle, Bangladeshi bowlers have spent 5.1 runs per over and less than 27 runs per wicket in these matches which can’t be overlooked as negligible performance. In addition, it’s to be mentioned that these bowlers are playing their first world cup in this tournament, specially the strike bowlers.

Let’s look at a different angle. Bangladesh won their three matches against Ireland, Holland & England and lost to India, West Indies & South Africa. If we analyze the losers against the winners, a different image emerges. No game between winners & losers against Bangladesh was such a low scoring match like Bangladesh did against West Indies and South Africa. The lowest score was 115 by Netherland against West Indies, which is almost double to Bangladesh’s performance. Though they are associate member of ICC, they performed better than Bangladesh in terms of average and consistency. England was undefeated against the winners with two wins and one tie. Again, Bangladesh scored 140 on average while Ireland 193, Netherland 141 and England 251. With these results we can say, loosing the match to Bangladesh for England was an accident which might be stimulated by the benefit of home ground.

Let’s get back to basis of the expectation and it’s the performance of Bangladesh in 2^nd half of 2010. During this time they played with England, Ireland but didn’t play against India, West Indies and South Africa. Two worst defeats were against West Indies and South Africa with whom they last played on July 31, 2009 and Nov 9, 2008 respectively. This leads to a conception of being less aware of the opponents. A consideration may be they had to pay more attention on coming out of mistakes, minimizing to the lowest rather than focusing on opponent’s strength analysis.

Considering above issues, it can be concluded that despite of absence of the best bowler in the squad, Bangladesh bowling performed well at least better than batting. As they won 3 matches out of 6 matches (basically with the performance of bowling department), it’s not a failure though 2 of them are against non-test playing countries. For better performance in coming days Bangladesh should pay special attention to improve their batting, get clear idea about the strength and weakness of the opponent.