Mosaddek defends Bangladesh bowlers and one-dimensional spin attack

Bangladesh now have to beat Sri Lanka in a do-or-die game on Thursday with very little time for a turnaround. Mosaddek, who top-scored with an unbeaten 48 off 31, said that the make-up of Bangladesh’s spin attack was such that they were limited in their approach, and needed the fast bowlers to step up on a Sharjah pitch that tended to keep low.

“Afghanistan has one of the best spin attacks in the world,” Mosaddek said. “When you take that into account, we don’t have a big spinner. We don’t have a wristspinner. We are all orthodox spinners. We didn’t lose this game for not picking enough spinners. It was difficult to hit the ball off a hard length. It wasn’t wrong to play with three seamers. I think it was good enough for us to push them as we defended a total like 127.”

Bangladesh were reeling at 89 for 6 before Mosaddek’s career-best knock, which included the only six of the innings, lifted them to a more respectable total. He said that they would have wanted to have more wickets in hand in the last five overs, when they were 87 for 5.

“We were short by 10 or 15 runs,” he said. “It would have been a different scenario if we made 140. It is always difficult to set up a game when you lose two or three wickets in the powerplay.

“Losing wickets makes it difficult to score heavily. We would have been in a better position had we entered the last five overs with seven wickets in hand, which they did, and Najibullah played really well. They executed better than us in the last five overs, and took the game away from us.”

Mosaddek said that there was a Bangladeshi vibe in Sharjah, particularly with a huge expatriate crowd turning up to make it a full house. But the pitch, despite the low bounce at times, wasn’t really like their favourite venue, the Shere Bangla National Stadium in Dhaka.

“This wicket is totally different from Mirpur,” Mosaddek said. “The ball turns in Mirpur, and sometimes when it is a good wicket we get to score runs. We saw that it was difficult to bat here, the ball was keeping low. They bowled well. It would have helped us had we scored 10-15 more runs.”

Mosaddek defended his fast bowling team-mates Mustafizur Rahman and Mohammad Saifuddin who leaked 17 and 22 runs respectively, when Afghanistan needed 43 runs off 24 balls.

“If [Saifuddin] got one wicket in that over, it would have been a different scenario for us. We probably would have won the game, so you can’t really call it a turning point.

“You always expect one or two overs to go for 20 runs in a T20. We tried to minimize the runs as much as possible in the next over. We didn’t execute it well.”