Bangladesh looked unlikely to get 285, so their pressure index (PI)* at the start was well above 150.
Tamim Iqbal had to reproduce his World Cup magic if Bangladesh were to have any chance; but Tamim could only manage a messy run out and an angry verbal exchange.
Aftab Ahmed looked good. At 51/1, after the 10th over, the match promised to develop into some sort of contest. But Zaheer Khan dealt two blows in successive overs to send back Javed Omar and Saqibul Hasan. At 58/3, and with a PI of 166, Bangladesh's back was effectively broken.
Mohammad Ashraful and Aftab Ahmed soldiered on bravely scoring at a run-a-ball for almost five overs. But young Piyush Chawla then castled Ashraful, and Ramesh Powar got rid of Aftab. At 92/5, with a PI of 172, the match was practically over.
Given the unbearable heat, the players should probably have walked off. But Habibul Bashar clung on to make a painful 43 in 88 balls, and Mashrafe Mortaza looked even more like Kapil Dev as he hit four successive sixes off Dinesh Mongia.
After their high at the World Cup Bangladesh are beginning to look like minnows again.
*The pressure index (PI) is a number between 0 and 200 that tries to measure, on a ball-by-ball basis, the "pressure" that an ODI team feels while chasing a victory target. A PI around 100 means both teams have an even chance of winning. If the PI is consistently high (over 150), the chasing team is very likely to lose.
Rediff.com's live scorecard now shows the PI value after every ball, and also plots the pressure curve.
If the pressure curve is stretched out, the length of the stretched curve is a good indicator of how close the match was. With a length of just 386, this was a "one-sided" match.
[0-300: completely one-sided | 300-500: one-sided | 500-600: somewhat close | 600-650: close | more than 650: very close]
Srinivas Bhogle, Sunil Patil and T M Sunil Kumar work for Cranes Software International Limited, Bangalore.
