1st Test: England v Bangladesh: Lord's 26-30 May

[flanflinger]

Originally Posted by Kirsty Harris

seeing Flintoff bowling at some of their batsmen was truely a case of men against boys

Some of them literally are boys!! It's Ok playing Young players, but a 16 year old. Tendulkar managed to cope with that, but he is truly special. The problem is taht every time I see a Bagldesh side they are giving a teenager a debut.. where are these guys now? Probably shell-shocked by the experince...

[Kirsty Harris]

Originally Posted by Mongoose

Having said that, this was Bangladesh's first match in England, at Lords too, and the movement through the air was considerable. So it was a tough introduction to English conditions.

In the 1st innings, I agree conditions were a little tricky, but there is no excuse for their second innings performance. As you say, they didn't even seem to have a grasp of basic batting concepts.

By the way, am i the only person who thinks Batty was robbed of the Man of the Match award - all the hanging around kicking his heels doing nothing must have been exhusting!!

[pakindya fan]

wots the point of these matches. Bangladesh are useless and need to improve vastly.

all the big teams should be in there own league/rankings and teams like bangladesh and zimbabwe should join the likes of usa,scotland and canada. I think that holland are a much better side and are improving more than bangladesh.

[vvvrulz]

Ill sum up this thread and match in one word..


Farce.

[Lemming]

It was a shame for me to see how poorly Bangladesh played. Early summer English conditions were not the best you could wish for in your first test match here and possibly they were over-awed by Lords. I did think also that England were pretty ruthless at times and on the whole bowled very well exploiting some obvious Bangladesh weaknesses.

I think it would be good for cricket for a second tier of teams (Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Holland etc.) to play 4/5 day first class matches against each other but also to mix things up and reward those playing better a few small series against some test teams so no smaller team is stuck in a rut trying to make test status.

From what it sounds Bangladesh is starting to turn cricket mad, and with a population of 140 million there's a chance that a high test match standard could be achieved within 20 years or so, hopefully with them improving with every test match. We'll see.

[Mongoose]

Originally Posted by Lemming

I think it would be good for cricket for a second tier of teams (Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Holland etc.) to play 4/5 day first class matches against each other but also to mix things up and reward those playing better a few small series against some test teams so no smaller team is stuck in a rut trying to make test status.

I think I may have said something along these lines in another thread. I actually tried to work out some sort of sysytem whereby the top teams from a 'second' tier' of test cricket could play the lower teams from the top tier. E.g. Bangladesh / Zimbabwe could play against West Indies. Another idea would be to use the likes of Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and Kenya to face A-teams from Eng, Aus etc. Lemming has just come in and told me this idea was discussed on telly recently. He can't remember who said it. Anyone know who it was and what exactly they were suggesting?