Bangladesh batting against India

Bangladesh won the toss and elected to bat against India in the first of their three-match one-day international series at Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium at Mirpur on Thursday afternoon. The play began at 3:00pm (local time). With Champions Trophy qualification on the line, the buoyant home side are playing in their own backyard as monsoon threatens ODIs after wrecking havoc in the one-off Test between the two neighbouring countries. The Tigers also have the World Cup quarter-finals defeat against India fresh in their memories. As a result, intentions of payback are hard to write off. No Bangladesh player said anything about revenge, but surely, they would not want to let the chance slip by given the team’s present form. The hosts are high on confidence on the back of a 5-0 thrashing of Zimbabwe, their most successful World Cup campaign and a 3-0 series win over 1992 world champions Pakistan. What’s more, they have won their last eight ODIs at home. Despite being no match for India in Tests, Bangladesh have beaten their neighbours in competitions like the World Cup and Asia Cup in the 50-over game. More crucially for them, a win in the series will help them remain in the top eight in the ODI rankings and keep their hopes of playing the Champions Trophy alive. Bangladesh’s ODI bowling unit has an edge over their Test attack with the return of pace trio captain Mashrafe Bin Mortaza, Rubel Hossain and Taskin Ahmed. Mashrafe is quite confident with the pace attack. He himself has recovered from a recent injury. “As a captain I believe I have a pretty good pace attack at the moment. They can do well against any team.” Bangladesh have a formidable spin attack to back the seamers. As usual, southpaw Shakib Al Hasan will lead the attack with Arafat Sunny as his wingman. Nasir Hossain and Sabbir Rahman are quite capable of bowling a few overs between themselves to stem the flow of runs. Shakib, Sabbir and Nasir have had little batting recently due to the top-order’s dominance in the last series against Pakistan. Tamim Iqbal scored back-to-back centuries in the first two ODIs while young Soumya Sarkar scored his maiden ton in the third. Nasir only faced one delivery in the series. Mahmudullah Riyad will be absent at three due to a finger injury and his replacement Liton Das is set for debut on Thursday. With a balanced side at his disposal, the captain is quite confident of putting up a fight. “Our batting is strong. Our bowling is not bad. We’ve had a good series against Pakistan. It is always challenging to face India. I firmly believe they are the favourites. But I don’t believe that we can’t beat them. We will definitely go for the win,” according to a news agency.