Bangladesh at the 1999 World Cup: Beating Pakistan

Pakistan reached the final of the 1999 World Cup. On the way there they lost to a side that had never played a Test match, at a county ground in Northamptonshire, by sixty-two runs, in a game their bowlers had every reason to control. That afternoon of 31 May 1999 is the single most consequential day in Bangladesh's cricket history, and its consequence was not the two points.

The two points were meaningless. Bangladesh were already out of contention, Pakistan already through to the Super Six. What the result did was hand the Bangladesh Cricket Board an argument it had been making for years without evidence: that the country was ready for full membership of the ICC. Thirteen months later the ICC agreed.

The campaign is often remembered only for that one match, which does the rest of it an injustice. Bangladesh arrived in England as tournament novices, lost three games heavily, won two, and went home having played the only kind of cricket that changes minds — the kind that beats somebody good.

Kuala Lumpur, 1997: the door opens

Bangladesh got to England by winning the ICC Trophy, the qualifying tournament for associate nations, staged in and around Kuala Lumpur between late March and 13 April 1997. The final against Kenya was interrupted by rain, recalculated under the Duckworth-Lewis method, and won by two wickets off the last available ball. Scotland took third place and also qualified.

That match, and the way it was received at home, belongs to the country's civic history as much as its sporting one. Dhaka emptied into the streets. The team came back to a reception normally reserved for national occasions. Anyone trying to understand why cricket occupies the position it does in Bangladesh should start with April 1997 rather than with any later trophy; the broader arc is set out in the history of Bangladesh cricket.

Qualification also created a deadline. Bangladesh had two years to build a squad capable of not embarrassing itself against Australia, and a board with no experience of preparing a team for a global event.

The squad, and the coach who was about to be sacked

Aminul Islam captained. Gordon Greenidge, the former West Indies opener who had coached the side through the ICC Trophy win, was the coach — though by the last week of the group stage his relationship with the board president had collapsed and the board was preparing to dispense with him. The team that beat Pakistan was, in effect, playing for a coach on notice.

The playing group mixed the survivors of the associate years with the first genuinely professional generation. Akram Khan and Minhajul Abedin had been senior batters since the 1980s. Khaled Mashud kept wicket. Mohammad Rafique and Naimur Rahman offered spin and lower-order runs — Rafique's long career is traced in the guide to the Bangladesh spin bowling tradition. Hasibul Hossain and Manjural Islam carried the seam bowling, in an era before Bangladesh had produced a fast bowler anyone outside the country could name, a gap covered in the account of Bangladesh's fast bowling growth.

Khaled Mahmud was the medium-pace all-rounder nobody outside Dhaka had heard of. He finished the tournament as the most talked-about cricketer in the country.

Chelmsford and Dublin

The opening two fixtures established how far behind Bangladesh were.

At Chelmsford on 17 May, New Zealand bowled them out for 116 in under thirty-eight overs — Geoff Allott, Chris Cairns and Gavin Larsen taking three wickets each — and knocked the runs off inside thirty-three overs for the loss of four wickets. It was a competent professional dismantling of a side that had not faced that class of seam bowling in match conditions.

Four days later, at Castle Avenue in Dublin, West Indies won by seven wickets. On 27 May at Chester-le-Street, Australia won by seven wickets. Three matches, three defeats, none of them close.

The pattern was the one every new side meets in its first tournament. Bangladesh could bowl tidily for twenty overs and then leak; they could bat sensibly for fifteen and then collapse. What was missing was not talent but the habit of a full fifty overs, which is precisely what domestic cricket in the country was not yet supplying — the structural side of that story sits in the guide to Bangladesh's national first-class competition.

Edinburgh: the first World Cup win

On 24 May, between the West Indies and Australia defeats, Bangladesh played Scotland at The Grange in Edinburgh and won by twenty-two runs. It was their first victory in a World Cup match.

It was also an unlovely, valuable innings of cricket. Bangladesh were seven wickets down for a little over a hundred when Minhajul Abedin, the most experienced batter in the side, decided the innings had to be finished rather than accelerated. He faced 116 balls for an unbeaten 68 and got the total to 185 for nine. Scotland were bowled out for 163.

Nobody outside the two countries paid much attention. Two associate sides in Edinburgh in late May was not a fixture the tournament was built around. But it did something for the dressing room a week before Northampton: it proved the side could defend a small total under pressure, which is exactly the skill the Pakistan match required.

31 May, County Ground, Northampton

Bangladesh batted first and made 223 for nine. That was already unexpected. Saqlain Mushtaq took five for 35, which suggests the innings was never comfortable, and it was not: it was assembled in pieces, with Shahriar Hossain making 39 at the top, Akram Khan 42 in the middle, and Khaled Mahmud contributing 27 from 34 balls lower down, at the point in an innings where Bangladesh sides of that era usually stopped scoring.

Then Khaled Mahmud bowled. His figures were three for 31 from medium pace on a slow surface, and the wickets came in the phase where Pakistan's batting should have been settling. Pakistan were bowled out for 161 in 44.3 overs. Wasim Akram, the captain, top-scored with 29. No Pakistan batter got past thirty.

Mahmud was named player of the match. It is worth being clear about what he did, because the innings and the spell are frequently described in grander terms than they need. He hit a few clean shots at the right time and he bowled a slow, awkward, wicket-to-wicket line that a batting side with any patience should have absorbed. Pakistan did not absorb it. That is the match.

	Bangladesh	Pakistan
Total	223 for 9	161 all out (44.3 overs)
Leading scorers	Akram Khan 42, Shahriar Hossain 39	Wasim Akram 29
Best bowling	Khaled Mahmud 3 for 31	Saqlain Mushtaq 5 for 35
Result	Won by 62 runs	—

The allegation that was never investigated

The result arrived in the middle of a season of suspicion around Pakistani cricket, and it was immediately alleged in some quarters that the match had been thrown. This needs stating precisely, because the record is unusual.

Justice Malik Muhammad Qayyum was conducting a judicial inquiry into match-fixing on behalf of the Pakistan Cricket Board. He has said publicly, in later interviews, that he began looking at matches from the 1999 World Cup, the defeat by Bangladesh among them, and was instructed in writing to stop. His report, completed that October, contains no findings on any World Cup match.

So there is no finding either way. No tribunal has held that the game was fixed; no tribunal has cleared it either, because the inquiry with jurisdiction was told not to look. Pakistani players named in the wider inquiry were sanctioned for other matters. In Bangladesh the allegation is generally regarded as an insult to the performance, and it is fair to note that a side which had already defended 185 against Scotland the previous week was not incapable of defending 223.

What Dhaka did with it

The reaction at home was the largest public celebration cricket in the country had produced to that point. It also changed the political weather. Full membership of the ICC had been a stated national objective for years, pursued through the board and through diplomatic channels, and had always run into the same objection: Bangladesh had beaten nobody.

After 31 May that objection was gone. Pakistan finished the tournament as runners-up to Australia. Bangladesh had beaten the losing finalists.

On 26 June 2000 the ICC granted Bangladesh Test status, making them the tenth Test nation. The board's own account of how it was structured to absorb that promotion, and how much of the structure had to be built afterwards, is in the guide to how Bangladesh cricket is governed.

The first Test, and the long bill that followed

Bangladesh's inaugural Test began on 10 November 2000, against India in Dhaka. Aminul Islam, the man who had captained in England, batted for close to nine hours for 145 in the first innings. India won by nine wickets.

That match set the pattern for the following decade rather than breaking it. Test status had been awarded on the strength of one one-day result and a great deal of goodwill, and the domestic first-class game underneath it was not remotely ready. The wins came slowly and mostly at home, on surfaces prepared to suit spin — the mechanics of which are examined in the guide to Bangladesh's home advantage. The venues that would stage that cricket, including the ground in Mirpur that replaced the old Dhaka stadium, are described in the Bangladesh cricket grounds guide.

Whether the promotion came too early is still argued about, inside Bangladesh as much as outside it. The defensible position is that the 1999 campaign proved the country could compete in one-day cricket and proved nothing at all about four-day or five-day cricket, and that the ICC granted a Test licence on one-day evidence. Sixteen years later Bangladesh reached a World Cup quarter-final, a campaign covered in the guide to the 2015 World Cup quarter-final, and the difference between the two sides was the domestic system that had been built in between.

Where the campaign sits now

Bangladesh finished fifth of six in Group B, with two wins from five matches and a negative net run rate, and did not reach the Super Six. On the tournament table it is an unremarkable line. In the country's history it is the event that ended the associate era.

Two of the men involved shaped the following twenty years from the other side of the boundary. Khaled Mahmud went on to captain the side and then to coach at national and franchise level. Minhajul Abedin became the national selector. The 1997 and 1999 group is the generation that got Bangladesh a seat at the table; the generations covered in the rest of the cricket in Bangladesh hub are the ones who had to earn the right to keep it.

Sources and method

This page is built on the published match records of the 1999 World Cup, including the Group B table and the full scorecards for Bangladesh's five matches, and on the ICC's own record of the 1997 ICC Trophy and of the June 2000 decision to admit Bangladesh as the tenth Test nation. Squad and coaching details are taken from contemporaneous reporting of the tournament. The account of the match-fixing inquiry rests on Justice Qayyum's report and on his subsequent public statements about the instruction to exclude World Cup matches; no conclusion about the Northampton result is asserted here beyond what the record supports. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets; it is a descriptive account of documented matches.