@Sohel, after you said I went back and watched the replay of Imrul's innings on ESPN3. I also imported the ball-by-ball commentary into Excel so I could do some filtering and crosstabbing.
Here are the raw stats:
Imrul played: 46 Dot Balls out of an innings of 95 deliveries. That's a whopping 48.4%, This means for almost half his deliveries faced, he could do nothing. Compare that to Michael Hussey, a converted opener and someone I consider best in class. 22 dot balls out of 91 deliveries faced - 24.2%.
And the numbers are just part of the story. My visual takeaway was that he still went hard when he could have gone soft or did not find the gaps. Even here excel is your friend. For e.g., he was only beaten 3-4 times in his innings. This means he was seeing the ball well and the flat wicket meant there was minimum deviation so playing through the line was enough. There were 8 fullish or full toss deliveries which any batsman should be able to dab or nurdle for a single. He just pushed them straight to the fielder. Similarly 8 balls he played comfortably bu8t directly to point when 2 yards this way or that gives him a single. So on and on. Basically he still did not have a game-plan to rotate strike.
I am not saying that that SN _was_ being effective at strike rotation, but think of how he was approaching the ball and you can see he was trying to rotate. It's just that for some reason his timing totally deserted him most of the time.
Agree with you about Alok. I think what you say complements my brief commentary.
@Shakibrulz: Shak does NOT have any ODI match winning bowling performance. Think of Ajantha Mendis against India in the Asia Cup in Pakistan. The kind of innings where a bowler rips through the heart of a batting line-up. I just statsguru'd all of Shakib's 4-fers and 3-fers (the fact that he doesn't have a 5-fer is a clue) and on none of these did he break the back bone of an innings. On two of them it was Razzak who did it. Actually in the ODI format, and against lesser opponents, Razzak is the closest we have to a match-winning bowler but he just hasn't been as consistent since his action change.
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