More on Openers

[Zunaid]

My recent questions about our Test openers and styles in another thread was very interesting. Someone had mentioned that Javed Omar had not been given his due often enough. So I decided to find out how we have been playing and playing with our openers. I had some data which I plotted.
[MH = Mehrab, JO = Javed Omar, HS = Hannan Sarker, AS = Al Sahariar, SH = Shahriar Hossain, and AH = Anisul Hakim]

Here's the chart and my comments follow:



It does not look like we've experimented too much with our openers. And Javed Omar has actually been the most consistently used opener. Only after his not so stellar peformance in NZ (did anyone really do well there?) and the coming of Hannan onto the scene did we see him getting dropped. The more recent instance of his being missing from the line uo was due to injury.

On the other hand Al Sahariar was brought in place of Mehrab. My memory is failing me, but was Mehrab dropped due to a bad patch or was he injured?

Remember this was the time we were dropping players and bringing in new ones after just one bad patch.

Post Whatmore, it does look like Hannan Sarker and Javed Omar are the first choices.

And, please, no snide comments about having too much time on my hands. I've been loading BD Test data on and off for a while - this is the first time I had a chance to do something "useful" with it.

I would like to hear yall's comment - especially real cricketers unlike me.

[Edited on 30-4-2004 by Zunaid : tpyos]