Towhid Hridoy, a middle-order batsman for Bangladesh, stated on Wednesday that his team was capable of overcoming the 0-1 deficit and defeating Afghanistan in the three-match series if they minimised their careless play. In the first game of the series, Bangladesh’s batting weaknesses were exposed when they were restricted to 169/9 in a rain-affected match.
“I don’t think the wicket was very difficult but initially as the ball was keeping low it became a problem and it had two kind of bounce. If we could have done better with the bat then the outcome would have been totally different. Overall, our batting was not good today,” Hridoy, who scored the only fifty for his side, told reporters after the game.
“We have played against their bowling earlier and at that point we had some kind of partnership, like in the last series there was Miraz bhai and Afif. Today we felt that someone would play and there will be a good partnership but that didn’t happen. Hopefully next time we will do better in this kind of situation,” he said.
“We will come back strongly from here and I feel the silly mistakes we have done if we can minimize that, we can make a turn around and win the series. We could not give our best but if two or three can contribute we can make a comeback,” he added.
Hridoy stated that Bangladesh was eager to perform well against Afghanistan because it would boost their confidence against other spinners, given the diversity of spinners on the touring side.
“For the first time I played Rashid [in this ODI. I have played against Mujeeb in Under-19 while in the BPL I have played against Nabi bhai,” said the right-handed batsman.
“If we can do well against their spinners in that case it will become easy to play against other spinners. Even Shakib bhai was telling me that it will be challenging but we need to come out of it and do something good,” he said.
“We don’t have negative discussion in our dressing room ( like how we will survive if there is a batting collapse) and we plan according to the situation. We believe we can make a comeback from any situation,” he said.
“Look we are all experienced and giving service to the national team for a long time and so there is no need to say something to someone and everyone will make their individual plan to come out of it. We always back everyone in the dressing room,” he said.
“It would have been good (If I could keep the strike while batting with the tailenders) but at that point I was not thinking like that. The team plan was to move forward normally and see what can be done in the last two or three overs,” he concluded.
The two subsequent ODIs will take place on July 8 and 11.
