Women’s World Cup: Nigar Sultana rues lack of batting partnerships from Bangladesh against WI

Mount Maunganui : Bangladesh captain Nigar Sultana on Friday rued the lack of batting partnerships from her team in their narrow four-run loss to the West Indies at Bay Oval. After being impressive in restricting West Indies to 140, Bangladesh had four partnerships equal or more than 25.

But none were big enough to take them to their second successive win in the tournament. In terms of individual performance, none of the batters could make more than 25, the highest score in Bangladesh’s chase made by Sultana and an unbeaten Nahida Akter.

“We have seen the last two matches here. So, we saw that the spinners are dominating here and we were just planning to do the same thing. The bowlers did really well today to keep the West Indies batters in a decent total, which is incredible. If we could build up the partnerships in batting, it could have been different,” said Sultana in the post-match virtual press conference.

Sultana further pointed out consuming a lot of dot balls and losing wickets in a cluster (losing three wickets on 60 runs and two wickets on 85 runs) as other factors which played a hand in Bangladesh’s loss. “I know the openers gave us the best start from the last three matches. Shamima (Sultana) fell down today but the back-to-back wickets, it cost us very much and I think if we could build up two partnerships, at least 20-run partnerships, the result might have been different.”

“We need to work on our strike rotation. We took a lot of balls for start off the innings and even in the middle of the overs when we needed to take singles or rotating strike, it wasn’t there.”

Sultana also believed that letting West Indies score 70 runs in the last 15 overs proved costly for Bangladesh. “I guess in a cricket match that somehow maybe teams give up and sometimes they build a partnership. It happened, but I think from the beginning we put up pressure on them. They put up a very good score in the last 15 overs. We need to work on that. I guess even though they didn’t get any chance actually, but still we bowled very few bad balls.”

Bangladesh’s next match in the World Cup will be against India on Tuesday at Seddon Park in Hamilton.

–IANS