Sports Desk: Bangladesh will be eyeing to clinch their fourth successive ODI series win over West Indies when they take on the hosts in the second game of the three-match series in Guyana today.
The match is scheduled to start at 07:30pm (BST) and will be telecast live on T Sports.
Since beating West Indies 2-1 in 2018, Bangladesh are yet to concede an ODI series defeat against the Caribbean side as they later beat them again in 2018 (2-1) and 2021 (3-0) respectively on home soil.
After being whitewashed in the preceding two-match Test series and losing the three-match T20I series by 2-0 (the first game ended without a result), Bangladesh won the ODI series opener against West Indies by six wickets to take a 1-0 lead over the hosts.
Pacer Shoriful Islam finished with a career-best 4-34 while Mehidy Hasan took 3-36 as Bangladesh restricted West Indies to 149-9 in a rain-reduced 41-over per side match before Bangladesh comfortably chased down the target with 9.1 overs to spare.
The win was Bangladesh’s ninth successive victory over West Indies in the 50-over format suggesting that the tourists will be the favourites to complete the series victory today.
However, Bangladesh skipper Tamim Iqbal seemed not ready to take anything for granted.
“This question was not raised before this game (whether West Indies is our favourite opponent) so I won’t say that and I feel that if we want to win the game we have to play our A games,” Tamim told reporters after the opening game.
“They are a good team and they are a dangerous team and they proved it in Tests and T20Is. In the team meeting, I said look it’s not like because I’m the captain everything will be changed.
“Or as we play well in ODIs, everything will be changed. It’s not like that because the captains in the T20Is and Tests tried their best to do well but unfortunately we could not play well.
“It was very important that we could make a good start through this game (and want to carry on with the winning momentum),” he added.
Tamim also added that there are several areas of improvement for the Tigers but precisely he emphasized their fielding considering they are dropping catches regularly.
“We have certainly won this game but there are lots of areas that we can improve, like in a better condition and against a bigger team these catches (four catches that were dropped in the first ODI) will become costly.
“Since I became the captain, I have always said that this is one area (fielding and catching) that I’m very concerned about.
“We have to stop this (fielding and catching lapses) or decrease the numbers because after dropping four catches…probably we would have chased 115 runs if we could hold on to those catches.
“This is one area that we really have to look into like what is going wrong because I don’t see anything wrong with the practice. Repeatedly the same persons are dropping those chances which are actually bad and we should try so that it doesn’t happen all the time,” he added.
