Bangladesh at the 2007 World Cup: Port of Spain

Bangladesh had won two World Cup matches before 17 March 2007, both of them in 1999, against Scotland and Pakistan, and both dealt with in the guide to the 1999 breakthrough. In 2003 they lost every match they played, including to Canada and Kenya, and the side that arrived in the Caribbean four years later was carrying that record and a great deal of scepticism about whether Test status had been granted too early.

By the end of the tournament Bangladesh had beaten India and South Africa, put India out of the competition, reached the second stage for the first time, and lost six of their seven Super Eight matches. All of those things are part of the same campaign, and any honest account of 2007 has to hold them together rather than choose between them.

Where the side stood in early 2007

Bangladesh had been a Test nation for less than seven years. The one-day record was poor, the Test record was worse, and the coaching set-up under Dav Whatmore was in its third year. Habibul Bashar captained. He was a batter of real skill against pace who had spent his captaincy losing, and his tenure is one of the more sympathetic entries in the survey of Bangladesh's captains.

What had changed, and what nobody outside the country had properly registered, was the age profile of the squad. Bangladesh had brought through a group of cricketers born in the late 1980s: Mashrafe Mortaza, who was already the best fast bowler the country had produced; Shakib Al Hasan, a left-arm spinner who batted; Tamim Iqbal, a left-handed opener with no interest in playing himself in; and Mushfiqur Rahim, a wicketkeeper small enough that people underestimated him for years. Three of them had never played a World Cup match.

Group B, and the fixture that mattered

The 2007 tournament used four groups of four, with the top two from each advancing to a seven-match Super Eight stage. Group B contained Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Bermuda. Sri Lanka were expected to top it and India to finish second, and the arithmetic meant Bangladesh essentially had one route: beat India, then beat Bermuda, and let the net run rate look after itself.

The full structure of that edition, including the format criticisms it generated, is set out in the guide to the 2007 World Cup.

India's opening fixture was against Bangladesh at the Queen's Park Oval in Port of Spain on 17 March. India batted first.

17 March: India dismissed for 191

India were bowled out for 191 in 49.3 overs. Sourav Ganguly made 66 from 129 balls, which tells you most of what you need to know about the innings: it was slow, it was cautious, and Bangladesh's bowlers never let it accelerate.

Mashrafe Mortaza took four for 38 from 9.3 overs and was named player of the match. He bowled with the new ball and came back at the end, and the two spells between them removed the top and the tail. The middle overs were held down by Bangladesh's spinners on a surface that gave them enough grip to make hitting through the line a gamble, and India — a batting side containing Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag and Yuvraj Singh — never found anyone willing to take the risk.

A total of 191 on that pitch was defensible rather than hopeless. The mistake India made was assuming it would be defended by reputation.

The chase, and three debutants

Bangladesh reached 192 for 5 in 48.3 overs, winning by five wickets with nine balls in hand. The remarkable feature of the chase was that it was built by three players making their World Cup debuts, all of them teenagers. Tamim Iqbal and Shakib Al Hasan both passed fifty, and Mushfiqur Rahim finished unbeaten on 56 from 107 balls.

That is an odd innings to read on a scorecard — 56 from 107 balls in a chase of 192 is not an aggressive knock — and it was exactly right for the situation. Mushfiqur's job was to not get out, and he did not. Tamim's fifty had come earlier and faster, and it established the tone of a career: he pulled and drove Zaheer Khan and Ajit Agarkar rather than surviving them.

Bangladesh's supporters in Port of Spain, many of whom had travelled, treated the result as the biggest in the country's history. It was arguably not — beating Pakistan in 1999 had come with more shock attached — but it was the first time a Bangladesh win had reordered a World Cup.

Sri Lanka, Bermuda and qualification

Four days later Sri Lanka beat Bangladesh by 198 runs on Duckworth-Lewis terms, making 318 for 4 and then dismissing them for 112. It was a reminder that the India result had been a good day rather than a transformation, and it damaged Bangladesh's net run rate severely.

The Bermuda match on 25 March was rain-affected and reduced. Bermuda made 94 for 9 in 21 overs and Bangladesh chased 96 for the loss of three wickets in 17.3, winning by seven wickets.

Group B	Played	Won	Lost	Points
Sri Lanka	3	3	0	6
Bangladesh	3	2	1	4
India	3	1	2	2
Bermuda	3	0	3	0

India, having lost to Bangladesh and then beaten only Bermuda, went out. The 2007 format was widely criticised afterwards precisely because it allowed a single early defeat to eliminate a major side, and the next edition was restructured partly in response.

Providence, and Ashraful against South Africa

Bangladesh's Super Eight campaign produced one win, and it was better than the India result.

At the Providence Stadium in Guyana on 7 April, Bangladesh made 251 for 8 against South Africa — a side that had beaten Australia the previous year in the highest-scoring one-day international ever played, and that was among the tournament favourites. Mohammad Ashraful made 87. South Africa were then bowled out for 184, and Bangladesh won by 67 runs.

Ashraful is the most frustrating cricketer in Bangladesh's history: a batter with the shot selection of somebody who had never been told no, capable of the 87 at Providence and of getting out for 4 in the next three matches. This was the innings that justified every selection he was ever given. He drove, he cut, and he took the game away from the South African seamers inside an hour.

Winning by 67 runs against South Africa is a different order of result from defending 191 against a passive India. Bangladesh set a total and then bowled a Test-quality batting line-up out well short of it. There was nothing lucky in it.

The six defeats, and the Ireland match

The rest of the Super Eight stage was chastening. Bangladesh lost to Australia, New Zealand, England and the West Indies, and the Sri Lanka result from the group stage carried over as a fifth defeat. Then, on 15 April at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Ireland beat them by 74 runs.

Ireland were the other qualifier from outside the established Test nations, and the match was effectively a play-off for seventh place. Bangladesh lost it. They finished the Super Eights with one win from seven, two points and a net run rate of minus 1.514, one place above Ireland on that measure alone.

Super Eights	Won	Lost	Points
Australia	7	0	14
Sri Lanka	5	2	10
New Zealand	5	2	10
South Africa	4	3	8
England	3	4	6
West Indies	2	5	4
Bangladesh	1	6	2
Ireland	1	6	2

The honest reading is that Bangladesh in 2007 were a side capable of two excellent days in seven weeks and not much more. The batting collapsed repeatedly, the seam bowling depended almost entirely on Mortaza, and the fielding was the weakest of the eight teams in the second stage.

The numbers, and the left-arm spin behind them

Bangladesh played nine matches across the two stages. Tamim Iqbal finished as their leading run-scorer with 172, which is a modest aggregate and still the highest by a Bangladesh batter at that tournament — a fair summary of how the batting went. He had been picked on the evidence of two one-day internationals against Zimbabwe.

Mashrafe Mortaza also played nine, carrying the seam attack in conditions that were not especially helpful to him and taking the wickets that mattered most in the India match.

The more interesting technical story is the spin. Against South Africa at Providence, Bangladesh bowled four left-arm spinners' worth of overs: Abdur Razzak, who took three for 25, alongside Mohammad Rafique and Shakib Al Hasan. All three were left-armers, all three bowled a stump-to-stump line into the pads of right-handers, and South Africa — a side built to hit through the line — could not get the ball away. That method has been Bangladesh's most reliable weapon in one-day cricket ever since, and its origins and later refinements are set out in the guide to the left-arm spin tradition.

It is worth noting what Bangladesh did not have in 2007. There was no genuine number three, no second seamer capable of holding an end when Mortaza was resting, and no batter who had scored a one-day international century that season. The two wins came from bowling sides out cheaply and then batting carefully, which is a strategy with a low ceiling. Raising that ceiling took most of the following decade and a considerable amount of investment at domestic level.

What it cost India

India's elimination had consequences out of proportion to a single defeat. Greg Chappell's tenure as coach ended in the aftermath. Rahul Dravid's captaincy did not survive much longer. Effigies were burned, players' houses were guarded, and the Indian board began the review process that eventually fed into a wholesale reconstruction of the one-day side.

It also set the terms of a fixture. Every subsequent Bangladesh-India match has been played with 2007 somewhere in the background, and the way that relationship has developed since — including the 2015 quarter-final and the group matches that followed — is covered in the guide to the Bangladesh-India rivalry.

What it built in Bangladesh

The lasting value of 2007 was not the qualification. It was that Tamim, Shakib and Mushfiqur all played, all contributed, and all stayed. Those three, with Mortaza and later Mahmudullah, formed the core of the Bangladesh side for the next decade and a half — an unusually stable group by any standard, and the reason the country's one-day cricket improved so markedly between 2007 and 2015.

Shakib in particular came out of the tournament as a genuine international all-rounder rather than a promising domestic one, and his career is traced in the Shakib Al Hasan profile and in the survey of Bangladesh's great all-rounders.

Habibul Bashar did not benefit. He was replaced as captain by Ashraful later in 2007, having led the country to its best World Cup result to that point. The institutional side of those decisions is described in the guide to how the BCB is structured.

The next stage of the story — a quarter-final place, a home Test win over England, a settled fifty-over side — took eight more years, and is set out in the account of the 2015 World Cup quarter-final. For the longer arc, see the history of Bangladesh cricket and the cricket in Bangladesh hub.

Sources and method

Match details, totals, bowling figures and margins on this page come from published scorecards for the 2007 tournament and from ICC records of the group and Super Eight tables. The group and Super Eight standings are reproduced as they finished, including the net run rate that separated Bangladesh from Ireland. Squad composition and coaching arrangements are taken from contemporary team announcements and reporting. Assessments of individual performances are editorial judgements rather than computed ratings, and nothing here is derived from our own datasets.