Iqbal blasts Bangladesh to victory over Netherlands in World T20

Barnaby Read 18:09 09/03/2016
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  • Tamim Iqbal is Bangladesh's highest scoring Test & ODI player.

    Dharamsala, INDIA — Iqbal bludgeoned the boundary and kept his cool as others fell around him, a considerably mature innings from the Bangladeshi opener and one that he has so often failed to deliver on a regular basis.

    An undoubted talent with the bat, Iqbal has frustrated onlookers with his inconsistency and failure to live up to the explosive nature in which he burst on to the international scene in 2007 at just 17 years of age.

    His star quickly rose and four years later he was in the IPL and being touted as one of the most promising batsmen in the world across the shorter formats, despite playing for a team that was widely struggling on the international stage.

    Iqbal says he has preferred a more cautious approach over the last year and believes he is now being rewarded for those changes to his game.

    “I’ve been talking a lot to team management, coaches and senior players about how to go about T20 cricket because I don’t think I was doing justice to my talent as I’ve not scored that much in T20,” said Iqbal.

    “I needed to find a new way to score runs and I’ve been quite successful in domestic tournaments back home and in Dubai as well.

    If you were to purely look at the statistics then you would quite rightly question how he has failed to live up to any perceived hype.

    He is his country’s highest scoring Test and ODI player and only bested as T20I leader by Shakib Al Hasan.

    However, for every fluent, dominant performance of Iqbal’s there is an equally inept one that follows.

    So often his career has been a graph of stark peaks and troughs and it has been a frustrating exercise to watch unfold.

    It is testament to the faith placed in him by the Bangladesh selectors that he has remained a constant figure at the top of their order across all three varieties of the game.

    They will be hoping his innings against the Netherlands is a sign that he seems to be finally moulding into the player so many people thought he would be.

    In fairness he is still only 26 (Iqbal turns 27 on March 20), but a run of 22 games between this T20I 50 and his last way back in December 2012 has been a duck long overdue being broken, despite that being a relative few games to have played during that time.

    He points to his relative lack of T20I games over his international career but acknowledges his performances have not been good enough for Bangladesh.

    “I wasn’t frustrated as I’ve not been playing too many games in T20 cricket. Four games in a year or two games in a year was what we were playing and I’ve been playing for Bangladesh for the last ten years and only played 44 T20Is, that’s not long,” he added.

    “It’s true that I was not that successful but there is always time to learn. Maybe the last six months T20s have been really good and I’m very happy that I’m carrying that form into the World Cup as well.”

    Bangladesh cricket has blossomed in recent years, particularly the last 12 months, and they followed up their Asia Cup final defeat to India with another victory in their opener here as a sign of little stopping their momentum.

    Netherlands had expertly restricted Bangladesh’s progress with wickets at key points in the game but Iqbal helped engineer a total of 153-7 for his side at the halfway stage after being put into bat.

    The Dutch response struggled to get going and Bangladesh’s spinners turned the screw on a helpful Dharamsala wicket.

    Late hitting from Mudassar Bukhari took the game to a final over but Bangladesh eventually prevailed by eight runs.

    Bangladesh will now simply hope Iqbal can build on this innings of note and that it proves a coming of age knock, not a trend they’d rather not follow.

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