With Afghanistan making it to the semifinal of T20 World Cup 2024, Bangladesh cricket team has come under the scanner for consistently underperforming in ICC World Cups across formats. After making it to the Super 8 round from the group that had South Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Netherlands, Bangladesh couldn't win a single game in the next round.
In fact, their inability to chase a paltry total of 116 runs, that was reduced to 114 later, against Afghanistan attracted a lot of criticism. Vice-captain Taskin Ahmed has now opened up on the team's poor show in the mega event stating that everything went to plan for them apart from batting that didn't click at all for them.
"The seniors' off-form had an effect on the team but not off the field. They are great team men. We stayed as a team for 47 days. Everything was fine off the field. It is quite normal that a team will have problems when important players are not in form. I am hopeful that we can recover from this, and play better soon," Taskin said after the team arrived home in Dhaka.
Bangladesh's top three struggled in almost every game with Litton Das scoring the only fifty in the final Super 8 game against Afghanistan. Their best batter was Towhid Hridoy with 153 runs at a strike-rate of 128.57 with the likes of Shakib Al Hasan and Mahmudullah not performing as per expectations.
"When you talk about the batting, if you look at the statistics, I think every [teams'] batting department suffered in the USA this time. Bowlers got a lot of help. We got better [batting] wickets in the West Indies. I haven't seen such a long bad patch for the batters in my ten years playing for Bangladesh. I hope it goes away quickly," Taskin added.
