Bangladesh’s T20I captain Mahmudullah Riyad has blamed his squad’s middle-order batting collapse as one of the main reasons behind the eight-wicket defeat against India in the second T20 in Rajkot saying the visitors failed to measure the momentum of the game while batting.
Mahmudullah admitted his team was 25-30 runs short of an ideal total on Thursday night. "It was a very good wicket but we were 25-30 runs short. Having said that, the credit goes to Rohit and Shikhar the manner in which they started. The momentum went their way. We need to assess the conditions when we go to Nagpur. We needed to be a bit more positive," he said.
Mahmudullah said “there are few areas in the game, especially when we are batting, which we need to rectify. We have missed the momentum. We could have got 170. We were 102-103 after 12 overs, so we should have got 170-180.” “Losing a few wickets in the middle overs cost us and these are the areas we need to look on. The openers gave us a very good start and that should have taken us to a total of 180-plus. The wicket was very good to bat on,” he said.
“It was the momentum of the game that we needed to understand. We should have understood the threats we faced at that particular time, but we didn’t recognize those things and fell short of those runs,” the Bangladesh skipper admitted. He said “I think if you have more than 40 dot balls in a T20, you have less chance of winning the match. We played 38 dot balls there.”
He said Bangladesh batsmen have to take more responsibility. “The goal is to get a good score but we couldn’t do that. It is the failure of our batsmen,” said Mahumudullah. “If Rohit (Sharma) is having a good time, I think it is really hard to stop him.
