On a slightly greenish pitch at Mount Maunganui, Bangladesh kicked off the new year by electing to bowl first after winning the toss, going ahead with a bowling attack of 4 bowlers.
Taskin Ahmed, Ebadot Hossain and Shoriful Islam were chosen as the 3 seamers and Mehidy Hasan Miraz as the lone spinner. In conditions like New Zealand, the seamers are expected to provide success with the ball.
Typical New Zealand conditions prevailed in the first hour, with the ball swinging both ways and Taskin Ahmed and Shoriful Islam– who opened the bowling attacke– kept asking the Kiwi batters questions.
Young Shoriful Islam, who played his last Test match in April last year and on his 2nd Test match today, was impressive. He maintained strict line and length to the New Zealand openers and was rewarded with the wicket of blackcaps skipper Tom Latham on just the 4th over of the innings. Shoriful also picked up the wicket of experienced Ross Taylor in the 3rd session.
Taskin Ahmed is now the leader of the pace attack, was equally as impressive, whose extra pace and bounce provided with a great carry of the ball to the keeper. Taskin was constantly probing on the 5th/6th stump line and his first 6 overs yielded just 5 runs with 4 maidens.
The combined effort from the two seamers forced the kiwi batters to play sensibly by leaving balls outside the off-stump; thus the score at the end of the first 10 overs read 8 runs for the loss of 1 wicket.
However, since then the New Zealand batters, with their disciplined batting, started to score some runs and in the process, frustrated the Bangladesh seamers. Their run-scoring was made further easier, thanks to the introduction of third bowler Ebadot Hossain’s wayward bowling, who dished out 2-3 poor deliveries every over.
The Bangladeshi seamers could not make any more inroads before lunch as the hosts looked comfortable after the initial swing and bounce had weathered away, with Devon Conway batting on 36 and opener Will Young on 27.
In that situation of the game, when the wicket had flattened out and the batters were set, the real test for the Bangladeshi seamers began. Disciplined line-length faded away a bit in the post-lunch session.
As the New Zealand batters were playing to the merit of the balls and leaving balls outside the off stump, it required the seamers to bowl to a certain plan or even try and set the batters up.
However, such planning or execution was not achieved. This is where the skills of the Bangladeshi fast bowlers also come into question.
Although Taskin and Shoriful bowled well and challenged the New Zealand top order throughout their spells, Ebadot failed to be consistent, thus making it difficult to create pressure on the batters.
Playing on low and slow tracks back at home, Bangladeshi seamers often do not get the luxury to bowl on bouncy tracks at home. Hence, certain nuances of fast bowling on such conditions always turn out to be a learning curve for them. Shoriful, for instance, played his first-ever Test match in New Zealand.
Out of the 5 wickets that fell today, one was runout and a well-set Devon Conway, gave away a soft dismissal who got out to the part-time bowling of Mominul Haque and Ebadot got a rather lucky wicket at the end of day’s play as Tom Blundell played on a delivery on to his stumps.
Both Taskin and Shoriful toiled hard today. A bit of help from Ebadot in terms of consistency surely would have helped.
The bowling figure of the seamers was as follows:
Taskin Ahmed: 20-5-61-0
Shoriful Islam: 20-5-53-2
Ebadot Hossian: 15.3-3-53-1
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