Death by spin. Playing Bangladesh in their own backyard, you know exactly what is coming but that doesn’t make it any easier to bat against.
The Tigers love their stealth bombers and half of their squad seem to bowl slow left-arm. In fact, when our openers go out to bat it will more than likely be one seamer and one tweaker starting the innings.
Other teams, such as New Zealand and Zimbabwe, have already borrowed that idea in this World Cup but nobody invests quite so much faith in the dark arts of spin than Bangladesh in their national ground at Mirpur, where our tournament finally crackles into life today.
We’ll probably have to face 40 overs of spin out of 50, and we have tailored our training around that.
Now all of us are primed to do ourselves justice at a venue where we lost 3-0 when we toured here in 2008, but looking at our squad there is nobody better-equipped for this challenge than Andrew White.
The Instonians man, a late bloomer who made himself a fixture of the team in all formats last year, is an expert at the subtle cuts and sweeps that allow you to score runs when there is no pace on the ball, and he will be a key man in this paramount fixture.
Some have described it as a must-win but it’s not the be-all and end-all. The Dutch proved England are not a force when they scored 292 against them, and I think India and South Africa will leave the rest of us in Group B fighting over two places.
Bangladesh bowl well and field well on this pitch and we are going to have to play out of our skins to beat them — it will take another Pakistan performance circa 2007.
But having said that, if something goes wrong and we are beaten, we’ll still have five games left of which we will probably need to win three to get to the quarter-finals.
Four years ago, in fact, it was the win over Bangladesh that pleased me as captain most. It was the best all-round performance from an Irish team I have been involved with, and with the experience we have now there is no reason why we can’t reprise it.
I have to admit it’s been a pretty boring week. Outside training we’ve spent most of the time practising our putting along the hotel corridors, playing darts on John Mooney’s portable board or shooting some pool. Painful stuff.
We are the last team to get started, and I am desperate to get out there. At 36, training is something I wish I could get by without and it’s now 12 days since our last game.
A number of us spent a day with Plan Bangladesh, a charity who look after street kids, and that brought it back into perspective how lucky we are to be driven around like royalty here.
Every time we leave the hotel our team bus is accompanied by two cars in front and two 4WDs behind, which carry about 12 armoured personnel. And they surround us when we get off!
It’s all intended to keep us safe, but I can only hope our batters can shake off the pesky Bangladesh spinners a little more easily.
Courtesy Irish Daily Mail
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