Bangladesh won the second game of their two-game T20I series against Afghanistan by six wickets (DLS method) on Sunday at the Sylhet International Cricket Stadium.
Bangladesh’s T20I captain Shakib Al Hasan said that the openers helped them get off to a good start.
Tigers openers Liton Das and Afif Hossain batted together for 67 runs while trying to beat Afghanistan’s score of 117. Liton Das scored most of the runs in the partnership.
The Powerplay was set at five overs because the game was cut down to 17 overs per side after rain stopped play in the first innings. The two players scored 50 runs during the Powerplay.
Even though the Tigers got off to a fast start, things went wrong when off-spinner Mujeeb Ur Rahman got rid of both openers in the 10th over.
Bangladesh only scored 20 runs in the next 30 balls after scoring 50 in the first five.
In the next over, pacer Azmatullah Omarzai sent a full and straight ball that Najmul Hossain Shanto played all over. He had just hit a six-ball four.
After 11 overs, the Tigers were down to 76 runs and had lost three.
Towhid Hridoy got 19 runs off 17 balls, but when Omarzai got rid of him in the 15th over, it made the chase harder than anyone had thought it would be.
Shakib, who won both the player-of-the-match and the player-of-the-series awards, said that he didn’t feel nervous because he thought that the good start they got from the opening stand kept them ahead in the chase.
“No, I doubt it was fear. “We lost a few wickets, but because of how we started, we were always ahead,” he said in an interview after the game.
Bangladesh won their first T20I series against Afghanistan with this win. They had already won the first T20I by two wickets on Friday.
After Shanto was out in the 12th over, Shakib came to the crease and led his team to victory with an 11-ball, 18-run innings that included a four and a six. Shamim Hossain at the other end hit the winning runs with five balls left.