Mashrafe seeks team effort

Bangladesh captain wants contributions from all of his men in the Asia Cup 2018, that starts in Dubai on Saturday.

Bangladesh will face Sri Lanka in the opening game in Group B. The Tigers are coming into the tournament with good form against the Windies recently when they won ODI and T20I series outside home.

The Windies series was mostly dominated by Bangladesh’s senior cricketers. The juniors struggled a bit on that tour. However, Mashrafe has said that he still has the faith in others stating that the matches they won were of team efforts.

“Of course, I believe in the juniors, and I believe that given enough opportunities they will do well. We haven’t played international cricket for a while after the West Indies tour, but there are players who did well in practice matches and we have faith in them,” said Mashrafe on Friday.

“You cannot really call them juniors. There are players other than us [the five seniors] who have played for three, five, 10 years and in international cricket you are no longer new or juniors after playing for three years. I think they too have to step up and perform.

“I would also like to say that the matches we have won, we won playing as a team. So that is very important for us,” he added.

As Bangladesh take on Sri Lanka, a recent rivalry comes up to mind. The Nidahas Trophy in March was complete tense between these two teams. A dramatic finish helped Bangladesh helped reaching finals by beating the hosts Lankans.

There were extremely heated arguments on the field during that tour. Bangladesh T20I captain Shakib Al Hasan threatened to pull out his players at one point.

According to Mashrafe, past is past and he wants to move on from it.

“You cannot bring an event from the past on the field. Honestly, those incidents do not come in mind while you are playing. Main focus is to win by playing good game of cricket. It is not the time for us to think of any other facts, and I do not think there is importance of this on the field,” he explained.

Source: bdcrictime