Bangladesh captain Mashrafe Mortaza citied his dislike of the Twenty20 format as a reason for taking the decision to quit T20Is, a day after Sri Lanka beat Bangladesh by six wickets in the first T20I at Colombo.
“I never enjoyed that format when T20 started. I played five World Cups but I never enjoyed it. Maybe because of my injuries. This format is quick and sharp so you don’t get enough chances to warm up your body, especially my legs which hurt a lot,” said Mashrafe after the match where he took 2/32 in his four overs. “I still kept going because cricket board was respecting me as a captain. I was trying really hard to build this team as much as I can. I don’t know how much I did but it was a real pleasure to captain in T20s.”
However Mortaza said he had no plans of quitting any other format. Coming back to the match, the Bangladesh captain said, ““The way we batted in the first six overs was brilliant, but we lost too many wickets in the middle... We need to be more calculating while batting.”
Sri Lanka’s hero was opener Kusal Perera who smashed a swashbuckling 77 off 53 balls to shepherd Sri Lanka’s chase of 156.
“I tried to finish the game. [I] had a couple of injuries but recovered well,” said Kusal Perera. “Every player has a couple of bad patches, [you] have to get over it, do the hard work and get out of bad patches.”
For Perera, victory was sweeter as he made a stellar return to the pitch after being dropped form the squad across all formats of the game. “I failed in the four-day matches after I came back, and I wasn’t prepared for them also,” said the young batsman. “Sometimes you have to be prepared to fail. I realised I got a lot of starts but wasn’t finishing things off. Getting those 20s and 30s are of no use either to me, or the team. So I strove to bat till the end. When the loose ball comes I am anyway waiting to hit it, but recently I tried to bat long, and that’s what’s helped me.”