Bangladesh national women’s cricket team head coach Anju Jain shared mixed experiences about her side ahead of the ICC Women’s T20 qualifiers 2019, scheduled to be played from August 31 to September 7 in Scotland. While talking to the reporters at the Academy ground of the SBNCS yesterday, she talked about what Tigresses’ learnt from their mistakes in 2018 World Cup and to execute those lessons in this World Cup to become more successful.

‘’It’s disappointing the way we’ve played in the 2018 World Cup for sure. But I think that had worked into the girl’s mind also. Now they really want to work harder than ever and that’s what we are doing this season.” For us, being good is not good enough. Last season the target for us was to make our presence felt everywhere and people have noticed our performances. But until we start winning more matches, it’s not going to solve the purpose for us. This year the target is to win more number of games from the qualifying round. Our first target is to qualify then we’ll start again and go series by series’’, she said.

“It’s not about lacking. Actually, at that time our batting didn’t click that well. If our bowling and fielding were concerned, we did well in the World Cup. But we have been working on that. We had three and a half weeks for skills and fitness campaign in Rajshahi. We had identified some batting areas and started working on it. Fortunately, we got South Africa emerging tour which helped us to find some new players. Now we are getting more balanced side and we don’t have to depend on one or two players’’, she replied to a query about last year’s World Cup performance whether there were lacking why Tigresses failed to secure a single win in the main event despite being emerged as unbeaten champion in the qualifier.

Giving importance to this World Cup she said, “It’s always good to play more international cricket, but our target is now to qualify first then we will start progressing to the World Cup after that. In the qualifier, we’ve to be at our best in all three departments and that’s what we’ve been working on. Since T20 is an unpredictable format we won’t take any side lightly and we’ll keep going with the same approach’’, she added

“Last year we started working with the fitness level and this year it remains the same. To compete in international event, players’ fitness level needs to be improved. If you see, the girls have become much fitter. But fielding is one area that we are still working on. It might make the difference between us and the other sides. Batting and bowling wise everybody is looking in pretty good shape but we’ll keep working hard on our fielding’’, she concluded.

Meanwhile, key player Rumana Ahmed won’t be able to participate in the qualifiers due to knee injury.