Lack of confidences took a toll on Bangladesh pacers as they failed to demonstrate their natural performances in the ongoing tour of South Africa, local cricket coaches said on Monday.
The Tigers were relying heavily on their pacers to make a mark in the series after dominating the opponents in recent home series thanks to their spinners.However, despite spending nearly a month in South Africa they could go nowhere near to fulfilling the expectations and at times turned out to be an embarrassment for the team.
South African batsmen exposed their inefficiency both in the Test series and first one-day international to score bagful runs and create some new records for themselves.
Bangladeshi bowlers struggled to find their rhythm from the very beginning almost during every innings and that was reflected in their poor body language both in Test series and first ODI.
In the first Test at Potchefstroom, Dean Elgar and debutant Aiden Markram put on a 196-run and they followed the feat with a 243-run stand in the second Test in Bloemfontein.
Bangladesh bowlers even struggled in the 50-over warm-up match when Markram and teenager Mathew Breetzke put 147-run in the opening stand but the worst was yet to come.
Hashim Amla and Quinton de Kock completed the highest successful run chase without losing a wicket when they overtook Bangladesh’s 278-7 in the first ODI at Kimberly.
‘All I see is a lack of aggression among our bowlers,’ said former national coach Sarwar Imran. ‘Their line and length were not right and they also lacked bowling variation, which was important to get success in such conditions.
‘South African pacers can bowl at 140-130 km/h but our bowlers can’t do that. You can’t assume yourself a great pace bowler when you’re bowling at 130km speed.
‘Our bowlers don’t play in the National League and they don’t have the capacity to bowl 15-20 overs in a day and this is obviously a reason why they are failing,’ he added.
Bangladesh Cricket Board game development coach Nazmul Abedin also expressed his disappointment over the performance of bowlers.
‘We knew that our spinners might not do well in such condition but we hoped that our pacers would give some fight,’ he said. ‘Lack of skills and lack of confidence could be the reason behind this.
‘So many big partnerships at the start of their innings showed they could not make any impact on the batsmen,’ he added.
Former national pacer Dipu Roy Chowdhury held poor domestic structure responsible for their disastrous performance.
‘Our domestic cricket is needed to be upgraded in order to get success in the bouncy conditions,’ said Chowdhury. ‘Our performance at home is reasonably well but we often get it difficult to perform in abroad as we don’t get a similar wicket at home.
Chowdhury, who is also the coach of National Under-15 team, was not ready to look into the shortcoming of bowlers, especially at a time when they were in distress.
‘Let’s talk about positives. I am sure our team-management is trying hard to motivate them to perform well in the next few matches. It’s not all over for us yet,’ he said.
-With New Age input
