Crowd turns up in force on exciting day
The environment yesterday at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium was in contrast to the opening day of the second Dhaka leg of the sixth edition of the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) when the tournament was welcomed back by a sparse crowd.
However, a higher number of people turned up today to witness Khulna Titans take on Rangpur in the day's first game and Comilla Victorians face off with Dhaka Dynamites later on under lights in Mirpur.
Although the first few matches of the tournament were low-scoring affairs and had failed to entertain the crowd, perhaps as the tournament has reached almost the halfway stage and the players have gotten a bit more acclimatised to conditions, the last five games have all been high-scoring thrillers. Likewise, the day's first game was also a high-scoring one that saw Mashrafe Bin Mortaza's Rangpur successfully chase down the 181 posted by Mahmudullah Ryad's Khulna Titans to win the game by six wickets and three balls remaining.
In response to the total posted by Khulna, all the big guns of Rangpur fired as Chris Gayle scored his first fifty of this edition, scoring 55 off 40 balls, while Alex Hales looked exquisite for his 29-ball 55. AB de Villiers also left his mark on the game with 41 runs from 25 balls.
In the second game of the day, Dhaka failed to chase Comilla's 153, losing the game by seven runs despite Dhaka skipper Shakib Al Hasan's figures of three for 24 runs that saw him become the first player to take 100 BPL wickets.
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