Cricket: My Dream Team

Cricket is most popular in this region, South Asia. Out of ten ICC members, four belong to this sub-continent, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh. The popularity resulted successful arrangement of ICC World Cup.

Peoples are mostly passionate to cricket. Each and every people have their own choices; raise their voice to explain good or bad, reason behind loosing and so on. Even if when our country gets them out of tournament, we don’t leave cricket. We always try to support better performers except it goes against own country.

Cricket is a game which needs competent performance in three departments, batting, bowling & fielding. The reality is everyone can’t give his best effort every day. Thus both in batting, performance of two/three are must. But in bowling it’s almost impossible to do it for one or two as at least five bowlers are to be used. Thus everyone have to perform or be replaced by other. Considering these all, I tried to select the best 11 combination for one-day international match. They are:

1. Hashim Amla
2. Tillakaratne Dilshan
3. Kumar Sangakkara
4. Jonathan Trott
5. AB de Villiers
6. Yuvraj Singh
7. Shahid Afridi
8. Dale Steyn
9. Lasith Malinga
10. Zaheer Khan
11. Muttiah Muralitharan

It was difficult to choose the best player for opening the innings as almost every country has great players for this position. Most competent includes Schachin Tendulkar, living legend of cricket, & Virendra Shewag of India, Andrew Strauss of England, Criss Gyle of West Indies, Graeme Smith & Hashim Amla of South Africa, Upal Tharanga & Tilkarotne Dilshan of Sri Lanka and Jesse Ryder of New Zealand. Most of them are technically sound and aggressive in the very beginning of the innings. But only two player is to be selected to start the inning. With due respect to all other, I would like to select Dilshan and Amla. Dilshan is aggressive from the very beginning where and Amla is silent killer. Sangakara, who will be at three, is a player with great adjusting capacity. In case of any accident, early break, he can take the lead to build the partnership, build the innings accordingly. He has proved it for many times, finally in the world cup championship. Trot is in form middle order batsman who will be there right after Sangakara and will re-building the innings in case of early damage. These two would be followed by De Villiers who is naturally attacking batsman but with the ability to handle crisis & increase run-rate simultaneously. Yuvraj Sing is a high quality finisher. He showed it for many times during his career for India. He can get himself into the flow nicely. While chasing, his finishing touch is really tremendous. When Afridi is at seven, it seems to be something different and unpredictable.

The counter part of batting is nothing but bowling. The bowling is supposed to be started by Dale Steyn who attacks from the very beginning. Many cricket analysts consider Dale Steyne as the most aggressive bowler of recent time. Zahir Khan has proved himself as an economic bowler in this world cup (2011) which contributed to win the World Cup Championship. Being economy from one end and aggressive from the other end will create pressure for the opponent’s batsman. Such pressure can lead to damage anytime. After these, when Murali will join, hopefully it’s going to be disaster from the batting view point. Malinga will be waiting for the old ball with which he will continuously throwing yorker length which is his specialty. All these are about pace attack. Afridi will add more value in spin attack. Despite of being popular, he proved his ability of bowling once more in the world cup 2011. Though Yuvraj and Dilshan is specialist batsman, they used to bowl almost every match and picks wicket which would be an added advantage regarding change of bowling, looking for partnership break or check run. With this combination, captain would not have to bother about the pitch-whether it’s spinning or bouncing.

Let’s come to the field planning. This team consists of many extra ordinary fielders which includes De Villiers, Amla, Yuvraj and Dilshan around the wicket. Sangakara is very keen behind stumps. Villiers has set himself as specialized fielder at point. Amla, Dilshan and Yuvraj will protect other important positions like backward point, mid-off and square leg while Trott will be protecting mid-on. Batsman will be looking for place to pass the ball through these positions. Creating constraints through high quality fielders, bowlers could go for their aggression and keep runs checked.


After all, cricket is to play on field and captain has to handle the bowling and field positioning efficiently. No doubt, Sangakara has the capacity to do so. With the combination of all these special players, hopefully batsman will be able to run for 350+ and bowlers will be able to bowl out opponent within 200.


Photo Source: http://www.espncricinfo.com/

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.