KHULNA, Bangladesh, CMC – Sagicor High performance captain Carlos Brathwaite says his players were deeply disappointed after failing to win the opening match on their tour of Bangladesh.
Braithwaite said players felt gutted, after they had to settle for a tense draw with the Bangladesh Cricket Board Academy in their tour match yesterday.
“As a team, it feels like a loss because we worked very hard for four days in some very humid conditions and to not get a victory and end up with a draw feels somewhat like a loss,” said Brathwaite.
“I think if we had gotten the full amount of the game – minus the rain – we would have gotten a winning result.”
Leg-spinner Yannick Cariah was the most impressive Sagicor HPC bowler, grabbing 5-79 from 31 overs, and left-arm spinner Veerasammy Permaul snared 3-55 from 28 overs. The BCB Academy, forced to follow on, finished on 217 for nine in their second innings – led by 118 from Soumya Sarkar – on the final day of the four-day match at the Sheikh Abu Naser Stadium.
The 24-year-old all-rounder praised the batting, particularly of Kyle Hope, Andre Fletcher and Keddy Lesporis, and said they fulfilled one of the team’s goals.
“We set out as batsmen to get hundreds and big hundreds and this is exactly what Kyle did, but I do not want to belittle the efforts of Andre and Keddy because they were also excellent,” he said.
“Most of the other batsmen got starts and we had three or four failures, but you cannot expect everyone to score runs in an innings.”
Brathwaite said he and the rest of the Sagicor HPC bowlers toiled hard in unforgiving conditions, but they were satisfied with the job they had done.“The bowling effort on a whole was brilliant,” he said. “The pacers didn’t get much response from the pitch, but we had a role to play”.
The Sagicor HPC team are on a month-long trip to Bangladesh and will face the Bangladesh A-Team in another four-day match, starting on Sunday at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium in the country’s capital of Dhaka. “Basically, I expect more of the same thing in the next match,” he said. “I don’t think there are many areas in which anybody could fault the team”.
