Sports Desk:

Bangladesh’s batting coach David Hemp insisted that his charges need to make sure they don’t fall 15 to 20 runs short as it has been the case with their batting group in the opening phase of the ongoing ICC T20 World Cup.

Despite reaching the Super Eight for only the second time in their history, Bangladesh are still struggling with their batting, especially their top-order batting which is yet to make any impact in the tournament.

The consistent failure of the top-order is a matter of huge concern for the Bangladesh team considering they can claim to be lucky to progress beyond the group stage, courtesy combined effort of their bowling unit.

Bangladesh need to be well aware that they can’t bank on the performance of their bowlers to bail them out on every single occasion while heading towards the Super Eight where they are placed with Australia, India and Afghanistan.

“We have seen that the wicket in this competition is not conducive to 200 and just make sure that we are smart enough to make those assessments of surface and conditions at the end and later adjusting and adapting to those conditions to give ourselves the best opportunity batting first so the bowlers have some target to defend,” Hemp said recently.

“If you are chasing, obviously you have to chase what you got to chase. That’s a different conversation and you have to play according to the situation. But when we bat first, we shouldn’t be 15 or 20 runs short,” he said.

“I think if you look at a couple of our innings, if we scored 15 to 20 more runs, we would have won the game under less pressure,” he added.

Hemp added that he has full trust in Najmul Hossain Shanto’s batting capability while he also backed him for playing the reverse sweep against Netherlands.

“The reverse sweep of Shanto? People can talk about the timing of it as he only faced just a couple of balls but the reverse sweep is a shot that he plays well and he backs himself to execute,” Hemp said when his attention was drawn regarding the timing of Najmul’s reverse-sweep.

“Batters gonna get out and that’s the nature of the game. Unfortunately as a batter, you make one misjudgment and you are gone. A bowler gets a lot of opportunities like he can bowl bad balls and still get a wicket. But batting is not necessarily like that. So if the batters have strength, it’s important that they stick to that strength and trust that strength,” he said, adding that he feels Liton Das isn’t doing anything drastically wrong.

“I think at the moment, he (Liton) is making a similar sort of misjudgment and falling short but his movement and the way he is striking the ball has been good,” said Hemp.

“It’s just a case of backing up a little bit longer so I won’t say he is doing anything drastically wrong. He has shown glimpses of it. Everyone knows he can play. At the moment he is just making one mistake and paying for that,” he added.

Bangladesh are desperately looking to both Najmul and Liton to shine in the Super Eight after they remained a pale shadow of their own in the group stage. The skipper scored 26 runs in four games so far while Liton managed 46 runs in four games.