Nigar Sultana 'totally surprised' after humiliating series defeat to Australia

Australia decimated Bangladesh on their home turf and won the ODI series 3-0. In all three matches, the Nigar Sultana-led side failed to cross the 100-run mark, registering 95, 97 and 89 runs respectively. Following the series of defeats, the skipper expressed her surprise and stated that the players couldn’t deliver even 10 per cent of their ability.

Notably, in the last few months, Bangladesh have done well against the likes of India, Pakistan and South Africa. After which, there was optimism about a positive result against Australia. However, the hosts failed to deliver which according to Sultana is an alarming bell ahead of the upcoming T20 World Cup.

She mentioned that when the team was doing well, a lot of things went unnoticed and added that the players should understand their mistakes and rectify them if they want to be part of the team going forward.

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“I am totally surprised because we have not played this kind of cricket for the last six months. You can accept mistake in one or two areas but the whole team played differently that put us on the back foot. We were not even 10 per cent close to our ability,” Sultana was quoted as saying by Cricbuzz.

“Look when you will fail and do mistakes... once you are doing well lot of things are not noticed and when you will do mistakes at that time you will feel... the need to do better in certain areas and that is good for us because this is warning sign ahead of the World Cup and we cannot go in this way and we have to move forward otherwise we will have the same results against big teams. It is high time for our players to think that if we want to be in the team we need to perform,” she added.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh will next take on Australia in a three-match T20I series, starting March 31 at the Shere Bangla National Stadium in Dhaka.