25 October 2003
As I write this, the fifth day of the first Test is dawning in Dhaka, and England are in trouble. At 153 ahead with four second-innings wickets in hand, Bangladesh have an excellent chance of avoiding a loss for only the second time in their short Test-playing history (the other time was when rain stopped play against Zimbabwe, the team that England turned over convincingly in the summer).
And this doesn’t really bother me.
My posting rate has dropped lately, and one of the things I started writing but never finished was how this tour was lose-lose for England: if they win against the world’s worst Test side, how much will they really have gained from the tour?
Let’s go back to the Zimbabwe series. England were in total control almost all the way through, and in Anthony McGrath we seemed to have unearthed a very useful all-rounder. He got a fifty on his debut, and his medium-pace seam bowling decimated the Zimbabwean lower order in the same match. When the first Test against South Africa came around, he was in the starting line-up — it’s an old adage of sports management that you never change a winning team. Although he claimed the wicket of Gary Kirsten and conceded at less than four an over (which, sadly, was economical for the English attack in that Test) his batting was woeful, contributing little to a poor middle order with scores of 4 and 13.
As we can see, giving the minnows of world cricket a good hiding is no indication of class, and is pretty much useless for anything but improving the Test averages of the players. Well, we can see that Marcus Trescothick is far more at home on the sub-continent than in England or Australia, but apart from that.
Another reason — or more accurately, closely-related pair of reasons — I don’t want a repeat of the Zimbabwe series is that I like to see smaller sides do well at the expense of established ones (hence my support for the Marlins). I’m a sporting romantic and like to see the favourites get a fright, especially if they’ve been talked up heavily before the match. When the England rugby team scored seven tries in the first half-hour against Italy, I could barely watch due to embarrassment. Italy fought back well, but I felt betrayed by the new, professional England. It’s fine to humiliate South Africa, Australia, etc., but there’s no sense of achievement in posting a century against Romania.
I’m not going to pretend that losing to Bangladesh is a good result. It’s not, it’s a terrible result. Not as terrible as it would have been, though, considering that they almost beat Pakistan recently. They’ve got a good coach and such a strong team ethic that they left out Mohamed Ashraful, the youngest-ever player to score a Test century.
Finally, I’m not sure if the joke I would have made would be in bad taste, so just the links: one, two.