Bangladesh ace spinner Abdur Razzak achieved the most coveted milestone of his career taking his ODI haul to 153 wickets when he sent four Zimbabwe batsmen back to the pavilion in the first of the five-match one-day series at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium on Wednesday.
Razzak was the pick of the bowlers taking four wickets for 41 runs. Coming into the game with 149 ODI wickets to his credit, Razzak, who often proved to be a nemesis of Zimbabwe in the recent past, again mesmerised the familiar foes by his wily left-arm spin.
Bangladesh have lost the match by nine runs and he was upset like other players. He would have rather preferred that Bangladesh had won the match instead of his landmark, said the spinner after the narrow defeat.
‘I knew it would come sooner or later if I continue to play but I honestly was not thinking about it as I started the match. It would have felt much better if we would have won the match,’ said an anguished Razzak.
Razzak in his first spell bowled six overs and picked up three crucial wickets only giving way 13 runs, after a terrible start by the Bangladeshi pacers. He clean bowled Chamu Chibhabha
to give Bangladesh the first breakthrough and that was also his 150th wicket.
He continued to baffle the batsmen as he lured Brendan Taylor out of his crease which gave Mushfiqur Rahim ample time to remove the bails, and then once again he puzzled the skipper Elton Chigumbura by clean bowling him in his first spell. He picked up the wicket of Keith Dabengwa for his fourth victim of the day in his fourth spell with skipper Sakib Al Hasan taking the catch.
‘When I play I am more concerned about what I can accomplish for my country, what I have achieved is a thing of the past, I don’t usually think about records when I play,’ Razzak said before the first of the five-match ODI series against Zimbabwe.
