Shakib puzzled by Bangladesh's decision to field first

Bangladesh all-rounder Shakib Al Hasan seemed to disagree with the team management's decision to bowl first in the Super 8 contest against India in Antigua on Saturday (June 22).

"Personally if you ask me in the Caribbean it's one or two games - when England chased that 180. Other than that batting first has been the trend for most of the teams and they have been very successful. So, if you look at the stats, I think, yeah, ideally you would have batted first, but maybe the captain and coach thought otherwise," Shakib said after the 50-run loss to India. Interestingly, Rohit Sharma said he would have batted first.

Shakib tried to guess the rationale behind the decision at the toss. "We thought that we could restrict them in a reasonable way so that there is a score in our head and we know how we should go about when we bat. So maybe that's the reason we decided to field first," Shakib said.

Asked if he was consulted about the decision being a senior player in the side, Shakib answered in negative. "No, I don't have any part or role in this."

He went on, "These are not the issues of experience or seniority. When there is a leader, a captain, it's his decision. If we would do well, the credit would go to the captain. If we did bad, we question the decision of the coach and captain. It's normal. It seems very reasonable to me. But that's how it goes. It's how the game is played. If you could see that we took two wickets in the first two overs, then you would think that it was a good decision. Since there were no wickets in the first two overs, naturally we thought that it would be better if we were batting first in this wicket."

He also seemed to disagree with the decision to open the bowling with spinners. Shakib himself bowled the second over after the innings was opened by off-spinner Mahedi Hasan. Shakib, in fact, bowled two of the first four overs, of which three were sent down by spinners. "Well, that's difficult for me to explain. It's the coach and captain's decision. They make the decision who to bowl, when to bowl. So, it's hard for me to explain," he remarked.

"But from what I can understand, we thought that the wicket would be a little slower. It looked a little drier, maybe at the start of the game. So that's why they thought that there might be some help for the spinners. So that's why I think the captain decided to go with the spinners."

'We need to understand how to play the 170-180 game'

Meanwhile, Shakib expressed disappointment against the team's failure to put up any modicum of a fight against the two strong sides - Australia and India - they've faced in this Super 8 phase of the World Cup. "If you are talking about result I would say result wise we are in a [decent] position, but we played six matches won three games and lost three games and so it is 50 percent and from that point it is not bad," Shakib said.

"What I feel, if we could put up a fight against these two teams [Australia and India] from that point we could say this World Cup would have been more successful and especially these two games of the Super 8 we were lagging behind from the beginning and that is disappointing for us," he said.

Shakib cited the underperformance of the batting unit for this failure, stating that the team are compettitive in the 140-150 games but fall off in the games with higher totals.

"Throughout this World Cup, as a batting unit I don't think we did justice to ourselves. I think we have potential to score big runs and the last two games we played... were on very good wickets, probably 175 to 185 was par score and we are well short of those runs against Australia. Today I think India scored 20 more runs but having said that, the intent we had to show at the start of the innings I don't think it was there," Shakib said.

"We also lack as a batting unit [on] flat tracks," Shakib added. "We understand the game around 130,140, 150 because we are habituated playing those kind of games but we cannot think when the score is 180-190-200. The bowling unit might fail one day [and] on that day, the batting unit needs to stand up and we [have] failed in that area.

"We understand 140 or 150-runs game but we need to understand how to play the game of 170 or 180 runs. [Even in the] BPL, if the foreigners play we can chase but haven't seen much apart from one game where Liton [Das] and Towhid Hridoy chased 180 batting well, where the local [batters] are chasing and winning games. So there is lacking in this area and it still remains the same. Our bowling attack is good when there is help in the wicket but when the wicket is flat we have areas to develop."

With additional reporting from Atif Azam