SPORTS REPORTER

Bangladesh women’s team head coach Sarwar Imran said that the Tigresses will take one game at a time but the aim is to win all five games in the upcoming Women’s ODI World Cup qualifiers in Pakistan.

The Tigresses left the country yesterday for the all-important mission and with only two qualifying spots up for grabs, the competition is going to be intense, especially in presence of West Indies and Pakistan in the six-team qualifying tournament.

The Tigresses underwent a camp before and during the Eid festivities with match scenario-specific training. There were separate objectives regarding batting in the Powerplay, the middle overs and death overs. Sarwar said that if the wickets in Pakistan are batting friendly as they are expected to be, the team can score big totals.

But the bowling will be under the scanner, given that there would not be much sideways movement for pacers and spinners cannot just rely on the surface and hit a certain length to keep opposition batters quiet.

Asked about the bowling, Sarwar said: “We are aware of it [difficulty in bowling on batting surfaces] and we underwent specific work in this regard during the camp. How to bowl and bat on batting wickets, what the strike-rate should be were in focus during practice.

“If there are batting wickets, there will be 250-plus scores and I am hoping that our batters would be able to score 250-plus,” Sarwar added.

It would be a huge challenge against Pakistan, who are hosting the qualifiers and West Indies, who beat Bangladesh at their home recently. But Sarwar backed his troop to attain maximum number of wins.

“We have five games there and one by one we want to win all five games. We have two strong teams in West Indies and Pakistan with us and the other teams like Ireland aren’t ones we will be looking down upon. We want to fight with everyone one by one and win five games to qualify,” he said.

The Tigresses will play a few warm-up matches before taking on Thailand in their first match in Lahore on April 10.