Bangladesh betters England

Well finally, yesterday England come out victorious after beating Bangladesh by just 45 runs when the expected margin would have surely been more than a hundred runs. It is no big task for England to defeat or even whitewash some Bangladeshi team which is a known fact. But, at the same time, a strong team of the caliber like that of England would be expected to take the game totally away from Bangladesh with the standard of cricket in England given a closer look at. But, with England gasping for win in every match, some scrutiny is required I suppose before coming to conclusions.

In the 1^st one dayer at Dhaka, England did well to successfully chase down the target of 229 runs imposed by Bangladesh but not before the Bangladeshi opener Tamim Iqbal notched up a hundred and as a result was also awarded the man of the match. This was not before the England captain Alistair Cook bought in 7 of his bowlers to contain the Bangladeshi batsmen when just 3 to 4 bowlers of a strong team could have got the job done. Perhaps, had England taken the Bangladesh team lightly, they shouldn't have committed the same mistake yet again in the games that followed.

But, that never seemed so in the 2^nd as well as the 3^rd one dayers at Mirpur and Chittagong respectively. The games that followed the first one dayer happened to be worse than the one mentioned above. The second one dayer was the worst of them all when England won the match by just 2 wickets First of all the target of 260 that the Bangladesh team imposed on England was too much considering the status of both the teams. And then, winning the match by a small margin with just 7 balls to spare is another blunder which points fingers towards the English team.

There has been teams before as well who have been imposed a target of 250+ by Bangladesh, with the recent such instance being in the tri nation tournament that happened in January involving SL, India and Bangladesh where Bangladesh had 2 scores above 250. But, in both the cases the opposition also belted the Bangladeshi bowlers at will and took the game away from them in a one sided fashion. And in the 3^rd ODI, England could not even get all ten Bangladeshi wickets though they won the game by 45 runs. Scorecard suggests the involvement of almost all Bangladeshi batsmen enroute to their total of 239 at the end of the innings.