By Fakir Hassen, IANS
Johannesburg : Referring to the Bangladeshi cricket squad as “minnows” is no longer justified, captain Mohammad Ashraful said after they sent the West Indies packing out of the inaugural ICC Twenty20 World Cup at the Wanderers Stadium here Thursday with a six-wicket victory.
“It is totally wrong to label us minnows”, Ashraful told the Citizen newspaper here.
“We’ve been beating big teams regularly for the last (one) year or so and we’ve made the Super Eight stage of two world championships, so I think it’s time people stopped calling us minnows.”
The diminutive captain promised that there was much more to come from Bangladesh after he was lauded for the fastest half-century in Twenty20 games off 20 balls as he finished at 61 from 27 balls.
Ashraful cited their 67-run win over their current hosts South Africa in the World Cup in the Caribbean five months ago as having given them the confidence they were using in the current series.
“We have a very young, talented side and we believe in ourselves. We knew that if we could restrict the other teams to 160 or 170, we could win.
“For the last couple of months we have been training differently. We attended a camp at the commando school of the Bangladesh Army and then played some practice matches.”
As the Bangladeshis prepared for their clash against the hosts in Cape Town Saturday, Ashraful had a warning for them: “We will try to do what we have been doing for the last one month or so and we will do everything we can to win the match against South Africa.”