[Eshen]

The assessment of Graham Ford, the Lankan coach, of Bangladesh team -

“Rating Bangladesh as a Test team is quite hard because they haven’t played a lot of Test cricket. They seem to play some good cricket against the West Indies although they didn’t quite get over the line,” said Ford.

“The thing that we better be aware of is that it is a nation that has produced a lot of very talented cricketers, a lot of players who are capable of turning a game on its head. Conditions won’t be that foreign for them, so considering all of that we’ve got to understand that we got some tough cricket ahead of us. We have to play really good Test cricket to outplay them,” he said.

“We got an idea of some of the players and we got some footage which we are going to work through. A lot of your plans need to be done with the plans you have in consideration, not 100 percent sure what the playing surface will be like. We know that Bangladesh has produced some very effective spin bowlers that seemed to work quite well for them. They have tried hard to get some pace bowlers into their system and I believe they got a couple of young bowlers that are starting to bowl at a lively pace.

They relied more on spinners in the past and they got some players that play spin extremely well, some lovely stroke makers in their batting line-up. They’ve played a whole lot more limited overs cricket than they have Test match cricket so it will be interesting to see how some of those batsmen adapt to Test match cricket. But being a nation that hasn’t played Test cricket probably as they would have liked to, they will be very determined to show not only us but the cricketing world they can play Test cricket,”

http://www.nation.lk/edition/sport-o...f-us-ford.html