Bangladesh spill win

Bangladesh Women’s National Team had a golden opportunity to start their ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2023 in South Africa with a win but Nigar Sultana Joty & co spilt the opportunity and succumbed to a seven-wicket defeat.

Batting first, Bangladesh got off to a great start as their first 10 overs produced 72-3, meaning they had the base to score big.

However, a late-order floundering of the Bangladesh batters meant that they could only amass 126-8, with only 54 runs coming in the second phase of their innings.

Yet, Bangladesh were in the tie, courtesy of their young pacer Marufa Akter, who ripped through the Sri Lankan, dismissing Chamari Athapaththu, Vishmi Gunaratne, and Anushka Sanjeewani within the powerplay and producing figures of 2-1-2-3 after her first spell.

It seemed like Bangladesh had a tight grasp on the Lankans but they allowed Harshitha Samarawickrama and Nilakshi de Silva to put together a partnership, courtesy of several spattered opportunities, especially by wicketkeeper Shamima Sultana, who missed an easy stumping of Samarawickrama among other blunders.

The Sri Lankan duo went on to combine and score 104 runs together for the fourth wicket, guiding them to their second win, with Samarawickrama being the player of the match for her unbeaten 69.

Expectedly, Bangladesh skipper Nigar was lamenting their batting performance after the match.

“I think we were short by 15-20 runs. On this kind of track, we probably needed to get 40 more runs because they are a good batting side and we had a very good start but we couldn’t maximise. It cost us really,” she said in the post-match press conference.

Bangladesh take on Australia in their second match of the tournament today.