Bangladesh will play their fourth match in the ongoing ICC men’s Cricket World Cup against India tomorrow when no hopes left for the Tigers to play in the semifinal, as they have five tough opponents to face off.
Bangladesh, despite making an impressive start in the tournament defeating Afghanistan, failed to keep up the momentum, as they suffered embarrassing defeats in the next matches.
Tigers went down to the defending champions England by 137 runs and suffered by an eight-wicket defeat by the reigning runners up New Zealand in successive matches.
Tigers, though have six matches to play and statistically or in accordance with the equations, they have a chance to play in the semifinal but it is more than tough and they can only dream but far away from the reality.
For Tigers to make the dream come true is beyond their ability when they will have to win all six matches, left to play. Among the six opponents, all but one they will have hard to win and that will be the match against the Netherlands.
Their challenges of taking five tough matches will start tomorrow (Thursday) when they will play India.
They will take on India with recollecting some happy momentum of their recent match in the Asia Cup when Tigers won by six wickets.
But the way India have been playing in the World Cup since their flying start with overpowering Australia by six wickets it is not hard to imagine that Tigers’ have slim chance to win.
India in their World Cup opener scored 201 in 41.2 overs to chase 199 runs against the mighty Australia. In the second match, they just thrashed Afghanistan by eight wickets with chasing 272 runs target in 35 overs and defeated the archrivals Pakistan in similar fashion by seven wickets when they crossed 192 runs target in 30.3 overs.
Apart from India, the other giants Tigers will have to face are – South Africa, Pakistan, Australia and Sri Lanka, so there is very slim hope to win any of the matches when all are on the race to book a place in the semifinal, none of them will leave any stone unturned to reach in the last fours.
However, Tigers have been passing a tough time after obtaining two points in this fixture and will have to revive their belief that they can still challenge for at least to win more matches.
A bigger reason, perhaps, is almost all the five strong sides in both batting and bowling showed their mettle in their previous matches.
Bangladesh will face South Africa following the match against India, and their (South Africa) recent form - they are on a five-match winning streak. In each of those games, they batted first, smashed more than 300, crossed 400 twice, and won by 100-plus runs. Arguably, they have the strongest batting unit at this World Cup.
Pakistan also chased 344 runs to win Against Sri Lanka, who also scored more than 300 runs in two matches.
But the main concern for Bangladesh is their opening pair, as the coach Hathurusingha also put across his opinion about the poor performances of the opening partnership.
It is very much alarming with the Tigers’ opening stand, as any of the opening pairs could not score 50 runs when the highest 47 runs came against Afghanistan in the first match.
The struggles of Bangladesh with their World Cup will continue, though they were impressive with an expected start to the tournament by facing Afghanistan but they have been significantly off the pace in rest of two encounters.
But their problem has been that their top orders including openers failure and the bowlers also have conceded runs at an even higher rate.
The batting is becoming a concern with their highest total was only 245 runs, currently have on the seventh position with two points from three outings and with net run rate -0.652.
Bangladesh will play their rest of the six matches with only the target to have some decent results against the tough opponents when their dream to play in the semifinal have almost shattered.