Disbelief, and not much else

A Bangladeshi fan reacts with disbelief as another home wicket falls on the way to their hard to believe surrender for 58 against the West Indies at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium yesterday.

It is not gentlemanly, it is not smart and it has usually never had a place in cricket. But now and then, on some seemingly God-forsaken days, you have used up every other word in the dictionary and yet nothing manages to quite hit the spot. On such days, no adjectives do your feelings justice and swearing really is the only thing that will do.


And for the scores of Bangladeshi fans who had turned up sporting their red and green for yesterday's crunch match against West Indies, swearing seemed to be the only way they could give good reason for the hardly believable events transpiring before their eyes on a sunny Friday afternoon.

There was nothing to foreshadow the astonishing fall down; no clear sign that such a shocking wreck was impending, none whatsoever of a crash that shamed even the yo-yo stock market in Dhaka. In short, events seemed mysterious. And when things are such, swearing, it seems, is the only way to ease the dissatisfaction souls.

“What is happening out there?” screamed a young woman, clawing at her face in utter disbelief. Her announcement, a remarkable endorsement of the collective mistrust prevailing in the stands, was amazing only because of its lack of expletives. Most others were not so kind, and the match had already descend under a dark cloud before the masses started chanting 'bhua bhua' in that exclusively Bangladeshi style of expressing dissatisfaction.

The rut started with shock when Tamim Iqbal flashed wildly at a Kemar Roach delivery to depart for a three-ball duck. At that point, most of the capacity crowd had not yet warmed their seats. Some were still queuing up to get into the stands when the audibly collective groan flooded in through the turnstiles.
A young man decked in Bangladesh colours was confused.

“Did we just lose the toss?” he hopefully asked. But reality hit him with a thud when the man three spots ahead of him checked his phone. “Tamim is out,” he said. “What a bad!”

And so it began.

It was a performance that started off bad, got worse in the middle, and by the end was barely even believable. A performance that left you feeling disgusted just watching it; full of ridiculous shots and terrible decision making. It got worse and worse and when you thought it couldn't get any worse it got worse again.
By the end of a miserable Bangladesh innings that had lasted exactly 18.5 overs, the fans had already started hurling their 4 and 6 placards onto the field in a collective sign of anger.

And by the time the innings changed over for the West Indian batting, people had already started sarcastically betting on the outcome of the match.

“I say it takes West Indies five overs to knock this off,” said Jawad from Dhanmondi. People pooled their bets and when Chris Gayle caressed Shafiul Islam to the cover-point boundary, sarcastic cheers rang around the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium.

It was perhaps the lowest moment in Bangladesh cricket, and Shakib Al Hasan himself confessed as much at the press conference following the game. But for the twenty-odd thousand, many of who had paid through their teeth to manage a ticket in the black market (tickets sold from between BDT 2500 to BDT 15000), this really was not good enough.

But it was Hossain, a young entrepreneur from Gulshan, who perfectly put the cap on an atrocious Bangladesh performance through an expletive-riddled statement.

“I spent much more time looking for a ticket, than I did at the game itself,” he said. “And I paid 7000 taka as well. This was not worth a single penny.”

Yesterday evening, not one of the 26,000 plus at the stadium would disagree.