A Look Beyond the World Cup
F Waliullah

February 24, 2003. Bangladesh has two games ahead of them in World Cup 2003 - New Zealand and Kenya.

After Kenya's upset victory against SriLanka today, Kenya had a 90 percent chance of winning their World Cup match against Bangladesh. But now the possibility for Bangladesh in beating Kenya has gone down to only 1 percent. And now ICC will really look to give Kenya Test Status that they had wanted. Also, the critics of Bangladesh cricket will be going hard at the ICC for giving Bangladesh's Test Status to Kenya.

Most of the Bangladeshi players so far had been playing test cricket without any pressure of winning a test match. If ICC grants the critics' wishes, then those Bangladeshi test players who have better batting and bowling averages in Test matches than in One Day International matches.

The names of the players who have better batting averages are Al Shahriar, Mohammad Ashraful, Sanwar Hossain, Alok Kapali, Habibul Bashar and Hannan Sarkar. Batting strike rate is actually a higher necessity for a batsman in One Day cricket, however, since the average strike rate of a specialist batsman of Bangladesh is only 50 percent, so strike rate is not so important for Bangladesh yet.

Bearing in mind that Bangladesh has been playing very poorly in this world cup, and that only a miracle can save Bangladesh from further humiliation, we all should now look beyond the world cup. And the most upcoming match for Bangladesh that Bangladeshi cricket team has a chance to win is the Asia Cup. Most probably two ICC associate teams - Nepal and United Arab Emirates will play in that tournament.

And knowing the fact that Nepal has beaten Bangladesh at the age group level, and also there was a time once when UAE has also beaten Bangladesh in one ICC trophy, so from now on we have to look at those matches as possible teams to beat. And thus break our world record of losing in consecutive matches in the Asia cup. Victories against those times will at least save our faces for the time being.

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