Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium, Mirpur

The Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium at Mirpur is where Bangladesh play. Not primarily, not usually — almost entirely. It is the home ground of both the men's and women's national sides, the venue for most of the country's franchise cricket, the site of two Asia Cup finals and a World Twenty20 final, and the place where visiting teams come to find out whether they can bat on a slow, low, turning surface for two days at a time.

It is also, structurally, a football ground. The stadium was built for football in the late 1980s, was rectangular, and had an athletics track. The Bangladesh Cricket Board took it over in 2004, dug up the track, demolished what needed demolishing and squared it off. Everything that happens there happens inside a shell designed for a different sport, which explains a good deal about how the ground feels.

The name, the size and the location

The stadium is named after A. K. Fazlul Huq, the Bengali statesman known as Sher-e-Bangla, the Tiger of Bengal. The ground sits at Mirpur, roughly ten kilometres from central Dhaka, and holds about twenty-five thousand.

The playing area measures around 186 metres by 136 metres, with a modest fall of some 29 inches from the wicket to the boundary. Floodlights were installed in 2009, which made day-night cricket possible and changed the scheduling of one-day internationals and franchise matches. The board's headquarters, the academy and the practice grounds are on the same site, which makes Mirpur an operational complex rather than simply a stadium — a concentration described in the guide to cricket in Dhaka.

Location	Mirpur, Dhaka, about 10 km from the city centre
Capacity	Roughly 25,000
Named after	A. K. Fazlul Huq, "Sher-e-Bangla"
First men's ODI	8 December 2006, Bangladesh v Zimbabwe
First men's Test	25-27 May 2007, Bangladesh v India
First men's T20I	11 October 2011, Bangladesh v West Indies
Floodlights	Installed 2009

The dates in that table repay a second look. The first Test at the ground began on 25 May 2007 and finished on 27 May — a three-day Test, won by India. The venue announced itself as a place where matches end early, and it has kept the habit.

What the square does

Mirpur's surface is the most discussed pitch in Bangladeshi cricket and the most consistent in character. It is slow and it is low. The ball does not carry, seam bowlers get little sideways movement and less bounce, cutters and slower balls are disproportionately effective, and spin grips from the first day and grips more on the third.

The consequences for how a match is played are specific:

• Batting is about surviving spin rather than surviving pace. Front-foot defence and the ability to sweep are worth more here than the pull shot.
• Two hundred is a competitive first-innings score in a Test. Three hundred is a large one.
• Seam bowlers who bowl fast and full get nothing. Seam bowlers with a good cutter get wickets, which is part of why Bangladesh's fast bowling has developed in the direction described in the guide to Bangladesh's fast bowling growth.
• Fourth-innings chases of anything above 200 are genuinely difficult.

None of this is accidental. The surface is prepared to suit the side that plays on it most, and Bangladesh's strength has always been slow bowling — the tradition set out in the guide to Bangladesh's spin bowling. The strategic case for and against preparing pitches this way, including what it does to a batting order that then has to tour, is examined in the guide to Bangladesh's home advantage.

The demerit point

The preparation has attracted formal criticism as well as informal. After the second Test against Sri Lanka in February 2018, in which the highest total by either side was 226 and spinners took thirty of the thirty-eight wickets that fell to bowlers, the ICC rated the pitch below average and issued the venue a demerit point, which remains on the record for five years.

It is worth being clear about what that rating means and does not mean. A below-average rating is not a finding of cheating; it is a judgement that the surface did not offer a fair contest between bat and ball. Bangladesh's position, argued consistently by successive coaches and captains, has been that home surfaces should suit home strengths and that visiting sides do the same. The counter-position, argued inside Bangladesh as much as outside, is that a batting order which never bats on a true pitch does not learn to bat on one, and the away Test record is the evidence.

Both arguments are honestly held and neither has won.

The two great wins

Mirpur has produced Bangladesh's most significant Test victories, and both came from the same recipe: a modest total, and then spin.

28-30 October 2016, against England. Bangladesh made 220 and 296; England made 244 and 164. Mehidy Hasan Miraz, a teenage off-spinner in his first Test series, took six for 80 in the first innings and six for 77 in the second, with Shakib Al Hasan taking four for 49. England lost all ten second-innings wickets in a single session, having been well placed at the start of it. Bangladesh won by 108 runs, their first Test victory over England.

27-30 August 2017, against Australia. Bangladesh made 260 and 221; Australia made 217 and 244. Shakib Al Hasan scored 84 and took five for 68 and five for 85 — the second ten-wicket match haul of his career. Bangladesh won by twenty runs, their first Test win over Australia.

Two features are common to both. The first is that Bangladesh did not make a big score in either match; the highest innings total across the four was 296. The second is that both matches ended inside four days. A Mirpur Test that Bangladesh win is not a Test in which Bangladesh dominate; it is a Test in which nobody can bat and Bangladesh can bowl.

Miraz's twelve wickets in 2016 launched a career, and his subsequent development into an all-format all-rounder is part of the story told in the guide to cricket in Khulna, the division he came from.

58, and the worst day at the ground

Mirpur staged six matches of the 2011 World Cup, which Bangladesh co-hosted. One of them was against West Indies on 4 March 2011, and it is the ground's low point.

Bangladesh were bowled out for 58 in 18.5 overs. Sulieman Benn took four for 18, Kemar Roach and Darren Sammy three apiece. Junaid Siddique's 25 was the top score. West Indies won by nine wickets with 226 balls remaining, which is close to the largest ball-margin in World Cup history.

It remains the lowest total by a Test nation in a World Cup. It happened at home, in a tournament Bangladesh had spent years preparing to host, in front of a full house. The ground's reputation for producing low scores was made that afternoon in a way no pitch rating could match.

The 2014 World Twenty20 final

Mirpur has hosted more than Bangladesh's own cricket. On 6 April 2014 it staged the final of the World Twenty20 between India and Sri Lanka.

India made 130 for four, Virat Kohli scoring 77 from 58 balls in an innings that carried an otherwise stalled batting effort. Sri Lanka chased 131 in 17.5 overs, Kumar Sangakkara making 52 not out in what was his last Twenty20 international. Sri Lanka won by six wickets.

That match is a useful reference point for anyone reading a Mirpur pitch report. A World T20 final between two of the best batting sides in the world produced 130 for four from twenty overs. The ground does that.

Milestones and volume

Mirpur has hosted an unusual quantity of international cricket for a venue of its age, because Bangladesh play almost all their home matches there and because the board has bid successfully for tournaments. In January 2018 it became the sixth ground in the world to stage a hundred one-day internationals, and the fastest to reach that mark. By mid-2023 it had seen its hundredth international century across the three formats.

It has also staged multiple Asia Cup editions, including the finals of 2012 and 2016, both of which Bangladesh lost — the second by eight wickets in a rain-shortened match. Those defeats, and the third in Dubai in 2018, are covered in the guide to Bangladesh in Asia Cup finals. Franchise cricket in the Bangladesh Premier League uses the ground heavily, and the women's national side plays its home matches there.

Getting there and watching

Mirpur is in the north-west of the city and traffic is the main obstacle rather than distance; supporters routinely allow two or three times the nominal journey time on a match day. Tickets for internationals are sold through designated bank branches and online channels announced by the board series by series, and international fixtures against India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka sell out.

For anyone who wants to watch cricket rather than attend an event, the domestic four-day and List A matches played at the academy grounds on the same site are effectively free and effectively empty. It is the best way to see the surface behave without the noise, and to watch the players described in the guide to the Dhaka Premier League before they are selected.

Mirpur is one of three current Test venues in the country, with the grounds in Chattogram and Sylhet, and it is by some distance the busiest. The other two are covered in the guides to the Zahur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium and the Sylhet International Cricket Stadium, and the full national list is in the Bangladesh cricket grounds guide. The rest of the country's cricket sits on the cricket in Bangladesh hub.

Sources and method

This page is based on published ground records for the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium — construction and takeover dates, capacity, dimensions, floodlight installation and the dates of the first Test, one-day international and Twenty20 international — together with the scorecards of the matches described: the October 2016 Test against England, the August 2017 Test against Australia, the March 2011 World Cup match against West Indies and the April 2014 World Twenty20 final. The pitch rating and demerit point follow the ICC's own published decision after the February 2018 Test against Sri Lanka. Capacity figures and hosting totals move over time and are given approximately. The description of how the surface behaves is qualitative, drawn from match records and pitch reports, and is not derived from any statistical model of our own.