Taskin Ahmed thought Bangladesh were on track to win the game with a few overs to spare. The worst-case scenario, in his mind, would have been taking the game to the last ten overs. But little did he know that by the time the game ended, the visitors would have witnessed one of their worst collapses.
Bangladesh started grand. They had the hosts against the wall with three Sri Lankan batters back in the hut for just 29 runs in 6.3 overs. But they couldn’t build on this dominance, and a brilliant Charith Asalanka century somehow helped Sri Lanka put a decent score on the board.
The damage, however, wasn’t too uncontrollable. Chasing a 245-run target in this day and age is by no means a challenge, unless you’re absolutely determined to make it one. Tanzid Hasan and Najmul Hossain Shanto were ticking the scoreboard steadily. Bangladesh were 96 for 1 in 16 overs, but that was when all hell broke loose. The visitors lost seven wickets for a mere five runs. Their Nos. 4 to 8 scored a total of 52 runs, out of which 51 came from Jaker Ali’s bat.
The first domino was Milan Rathnayake’s barely believable piece of fielding that sent Shanto packing for 23. Not long after, Wanindu Hasaranga swooped in and claimed Litton Das and Tanzid in the same over. Taskin said those quick wickets turned the mood of the game inside out.
“I was expecting we would win with five to seven overs in hand. Those two wickets in one over was the turning point for them,” Taskin said after the match. “Definitely, we batted badly in the middle phase, but we had a great start with 100 runs in 16 overs. Then 100 for 2 and 107 [105] for 8 – that was very costly.”
Had it not been for Jaker’s late-innings resistance, the deficit would have been even more mortifying. The wicketkeeper-batter took Asitha Fernando for 11 runs in an over at one point, but he kept running out of partners. And as it frequently happens in situations like this, he had to let go eventually, too.
“When Jaker got set, he was batting very well,” Taskin said. “He scored a fifty. With him, if we had two or three batters left, then we could have won the match. Yes, it’s accepted that we didn’t bat well, but seeing two or three guys bat on this wicket, it doesn’t feel like the wicket was that bad. That was our failure.”
Taskin suggested that the meltdown may have been more in the mind than on the pitch. The early comfort bred a little complacency, and once things started to go south, the panic crept in and refused to lift.
“Yeah, after that great start, we were a bit relaxed that everything was going our way, and suddenly, that run-out and one of our set batters, Tamim [Tanzid], got out,” he said. “Then we panicked a bit. We didn’t play our natural game, and under pressure, we collapsed. That’s how we lost this match.”
Sri Lanka are one up in the three-ODI series. Both teams will meet on the same ground on Saturday before moving to Pallekele for the last game.
