India vs Bangladesh - 1st One day International match

The first one day match between India and Bangladesh at Mirpur has thrown out a surprising result. Batting first Bangladesh amassed 307runs while Indians fell 80 runs short of Bangladesh's total. This is Bangladesh's 5 win against much higher ranked Indians.

The main culprit for this result was the pitch. Bangladesh won the toss and elected to bat first. When the first Innings started the quick bowlers of India hardly got any help from the pitch. In fact even a swing bowler like Bhuvaneshwar Kumar was not able to swing the ball at all. The result - India which was playing with 3 quick bowlers, all of them got thrashed by the Bangladeshi Batsmen.

The pitch helped the spinners, however India has just one front-line off spinner Ashwin. Considering the fact that Bangladesh has so many left handed batsmen, it would have been better if India had selected two off spinners for the Bangladesh tour.

By the 15th over Bangladesh had already scored 119. It was the off-spin of Ashwin that got India its second,third and fourth wickets. Before that Soumya Sarkar was run out and that was India's first breakthrough. Part time off-spinner Raina did a splendid job he bowled 10 overs for just 40 runs. The fact that Bangladesh has so many left handed batsmen made it somewhat easy to play the the left arm spin of Jadeja who bowled 8 overs giving 48 runs and picking up a wicket.

In the slog overs even Kohli bowled his right arm leg-cutters for 2 overs conceding only 12 runs. So the Indian spinners bowled 30 overs conceding only 151 runs. While the fast bowlers conceded 156 runs in 20 overs. This turned out to be deciding factor of the match.

When Bangladesh had come to bowl the conditions had changed . Earlier in the day there was more than 40 minutes play delay due to rain. So the Indian innings started much later in the evening, in Bangladesh the evenings are much more humid and there is more moisture in the atmosphere and pitch. This factor helped the Bangladeshi fast bowlers.

However after initially starting a little tentatively, Rohit Sharma who is wonderful batting form went after the Bangladeshi bowling and scored fast runs. He scored at almost a run a ball while in the other end Shikhar Dhawan was struggling a bit. The fast bowlers did create chances but the Bangladeshi wicket-keeper failed to hang on to those regulation catches.

The Indian fortunes changed after Shikhar Dhawan's wicket fell. The new batsmen were unable to cope with the bowling that was aided by the conditions and the pitch. Taskin Ahmed got the wickets of Kohli immediately after getting Dhawan. Had Kohli left the ball alone it would have most probably been given a wide.

But the hero of the show turned out to be Mustafizur Rehman. His leg-cutters deviated by a huge amount. Rehman got the wicket of well set Rohit followed by the wickets of Rahane , Raina, Jadeja and Ashwin.

The condition for batting in the evening was not great as on many occasions the ball was not coming on to the bat well. Rahane totally mistimed his shot in which he got out. On the earlier delivery he had just hit a boundary.

Dhoni fell after just scoring 5 to the left arm spin of Shakib Al Hasan. Jadeja and Raina did build a good partnership of 60 runs but after that Raina and Ashwin fell to the left arm leg-cutters of medium pacer Mustafizur Rehman who was the man of the match for bagging 5 wickets.

Bhuvaneshwar Kumar did provide some late innings resistance scoring 25 not out of 21 balls however the entire Indian team was out for 227 runs.

Had the conditions of the pitch not changed during the second innings the result would have been different . It also makes sense for a team like Bangladesh to have pitches which behave differently under lights. So that on occasions when Bangladesh wins the toss it can chose to bat when the conditions are the best pile up lot of runs and let the other team bat when pitch is helping the bowlers. This way it can on certain occasions beat the best teams that are ranked way above it.

A fair assessment of a team's ability can only be done when it gets to play in uniform conditions for the entire match. Today Bangladesh were very lucky as the conditions were on their side. Had India won the toss and batted first. Bangladesh would have lost the match. In that case Mustafizur Rehman's leg-cutters won't have worked at all. The deviation won't have been there and the pace would have been easy picking for Indian batsmen.

There are still two one day matches left in the series and Indians will come back hard. That's for sure.