First, Bangladesh versus Pakistan at Lord’s, the beautiful Lord’s, there’s no such thing as a dead rubber. We’re looking to obviously win. We want to win. We’ve practiced well. We’ve come up with some good plans. When we lost against India, it wasn’t a case of — it was we were out of the tournament, but we all recognise that there's one more game to go and one special occasion at Lord’s and a very good, tough team to beat as well.
Great question. Thank you very much for asking it. The reason I say that is I don’t like to give away too much tactically going into a game because I get a lot of my information listening to head coaches on the media from the opposition. I won’t be telling you what we’re going to do at the toss or how we approach the game. All I will be saying is there’s a game to win for Bangladesh, and that’s the important thing for us.
The one thing about Mashrafe with the players is that they respect him incredibly. I often use the word warrior, but he goes to war for the team, does Mashrafe, and people respect that, understand that, and they love him because of that. The players in the dressing room do love Mash, and this is — he has said it's his last World Cup, and it will be emotional for him.
Mushi got a little knock on the elbow in the nets, you might have seen. I’ve had no chance to see the physio yet. Generally, that sort of area, most people are okay. I don’t remember too many people breaking elbows off four rounds of the bottom hand. So I’m hoping that he’ll be okay.
They really enjoyed the walk from the coach through the gates, the great gates. As soon as they got in the pavilion, you could see them looking at the paintings along the walls of the staircase, and then heading into the changing rooms and looking at the boards with five wicket hauls and test match 100s. A few of them straight out onto the balcony and looking at the marvelous scene in front of them with a beautiful carpet of grass and big stands everywhere, and they were taking it all in.
What we look at, where we do take games a day at a time, match by match, but the thing is, if you look back to that India game, we didn’t turn up for those first 20 overs when we were in the field. That was a bad area for Bangladesh. We know that. We’ve addressed that.
I love working with Shakib Al Hasan. He’s an amazing person, an amazing player. He takes no motivation from me. All credit to Shakib Al Hasan. It's all internal. This was all done by Shakib. He was desperate to do well in this World Cup.
No, I don’t really feel the pressures of that because, you know, with Bangladesh, we’ve got the pressure of 170 million back home wanting us to win, but without the tournament, Pakistan can still qualify. Maybe the pressure is all on Pakistan going into this game.
Courtesy: © ICC Business Corporation FZ LLC 2018
‘pak’s performance not bad’
Facing the ire of critics and fans alike, the Pakistan cricket team found an ally in former captain Moin Khan, who believes the 1992 champions did not have a disastrous World Cup campaign despite standing on the verge of ouster. Pakistan's hopes of sealing a semi-final berth were trampled when arch-rivals India and New Zealand lost to England, leaving the road to the knockout stage for Sarfaraz Ahmed and his men just an improbable mathematical calculation. They will take on Bangladesh in their final group stage match at the iconic Lord's in London today. "Look if we win against Bangladesh we would end the World Cup with five wins out of nine with one match abandoned which is not a bad performance by my standards. So, whatever the PCB does it needs to think very carefully because just changing faces or positions will not help," Moin said.