Bangladesh women’s national cricket team coach Oshadi Weerasinghe pointed to the form of captain Salma Khatun as a reason for the team’s disastrous performance during its recently concluded tour of South Africa on Friday. The women’s team returned from South Africa on Thursday after failing to register a single win in the three-match ODI series and the three Twenty20 matches arranged primarily to prepare them for next year’s tournament.
Weerasinghe said on Friday that the below-par performance of skipper Salma Khatun also had a major impact, both on herself and on the entire squad during the three-week tour, as they are used seeing her make valuable contributions.
‘I think her performance was not as we had expected, both with the bat and the ball,’ the coach said.
It certainly had an effect on the morale of the team considering her previous achievements, where she had taken the entire responsibility on her own shoulders,’ he added.
Salma went wicket-less and scored just 64 runs in the ODI series as the Bangladesh women lost the three One-Day matches by six wickets, 95 runs and eight wickets respectively after faring similarly poorly in the preceding T20s, losing the first two by nine wickets before a narrow three-run defeat in the third.
Weerasinghe also said that the team needs to start their preparation for the ICC World Twenty20 immediately in order to rectify the shortcomings exposed during the tour.
‘We need to get down to training immediately,’ the coach said.
‘There cannot be any excuses for the way we performed, but still it could have been better if only we could have started our training a bit earlier. Now we have to pull up our socks to put up a decent performance,’ he added.
The only bright spots for the Sri Lankan coach were the two-fifty plus scores produced by Farzana Hoque (63 in the 1st ODI) and Ayasha Rahman (70 in the 3rd ODI) on wickets that were totally different from what they are used to at home.
‘Though we failed on several occasions to capitalise on the positive starts we had made in the series, still the two half-centuries in the ODI’S by Farzana and Ayasha Rahman were important as they will help to raise the confidence among the other members of the team,’ he said.
-With New Age input
