india 213 for 8 (Tendulkar 76*, Sehwag 52, Shakib 4-52, Shahadat 4-51) v Bangladesh
Sehwag's dismissal kickstarted a period of aggressive, smart bowling and captaincy, which eventually resulted in soft dismissals. Gautam Gambhir, who had been circumspect in playing outside off, went to cut a wide delivery from Shahadat and the extra bounce caught the edge. Rahul Dravid came to bat in a situation tailormade for him, but played all around a swinging near-yorker, and 79 for 3 became 85 for 3 in a matter of 17 deliveries.
Shakib kept his fast bowlers fresh by rotating them from one end, and upped the pressure by bowling himself unchanged until stumps. With Rubel Hossain getting reverse-swing from the other end, there were no free hits, boundaries were plugged away, and Laxman, especially, struggled to get off strike. For 13.4 overs there wasn't a single boundary.
Shakib mixed the offbreaks and the arm balls well, varying the degree of the flight as well. After a series of near dismissals - leaving alone an arm ball that almost shaved the off stump, hitting uppishly one bounce to short cover, and scoring 7 off 29 balls, Laxman finally over-balanced when looking to drive Shakib. The ball went straight on, took the inside edge onto the pad, and then rolled along to an alert Mushfiqur Rahim, who found Laxman short of his crease.
0 comments:
Post a Comment