Focus is on playing good cricket: Mominul

The Bangladesh national team attended their first training session at the Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium in Hyderabad yesterday. They began training at 2:00pm and the session extended till the evening.

Yesterday was the first time that the entire team joined the camp prior to the India series. While the team did have a two-day training camp in Dhaka prior to their departure to Hyderabad on Thursday, those training sessions were optional and the entire team was not present.

Top-order batsman Mominul Haque, who is yet to play an international game in India, spoke to reporters and talked about how excited Bangladesh were to play in India.

“It's very exciting for our country. We didn't play a Test against India in India before and I think it's been a bit long for this series to take place,” said Mominul, adding that he felt that Bangladesh should get more opportunities to play in India in the near future.

Bangladesh have gone to India following an 8-0 drubbing across formats at the hands of New Zealand. While they failed to win a single game during their tour down under, they did manage to get themselves into winning positions a number of times during the tour. Unfortunately, the Tigers never managed to go for the kill.

“Every series is a new series. We don't think about what happened in New Zealand. For now, we are thinking about this series and then the Sri Lanka series which is ahead of us. There is no point thinking about the past.

“India in these conditions are very strong. Very few have survived here. We look forward to playing good cricket. Let's see what happens,” said Mominul.

With a Test average of 51.15 in 20 games, the left-hander is easily one of the best Test batsmen in the team. While he has not fired in recent times, his numbers still remain high due to the brilliant start to his career.

In fact, he is one of five current players to have played at least 20 Tests and boast a slightly higher batting average than Indian batting legend Virat Kohli, a player Mominul hopes to meet and learn from during this tour.

“He is outstanding. He is the number one player in the world and if I get an opportunity I will go and talk to him. I like his aggressiveness. If you get aggressive, you will never lose to anyone,” said Mominul.

The left-hander highlighted players like Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja as some of the key threats to Bangladesh. However, he also believes that Bangladesh have the ability to take the game to the hosts.

“I personally feel that Ashwin is very quick and more intelligent than the other spinners. We haven't planned anything against him or any other Indian bowler. We are going to try to learn something from this tour.

“We played on turning tracks during the England series in Bangladesh [in October last year]. We hope we can adjust here. At the same time we have got good pacers. We will miss Mustafizur [Rahman] but we have bowlers like Shafiul [Islam], Kamrul Islam Rabbi and Taskin [Ahmed]. Kamrul bowled well in the New Zealand series,” said Mominul.