Bangla selectors wield axe on Ashraful and Saleh by Cricket Archive Staff Reporter

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Player:

Mohammad Ashraful, Rajin Saleh, Tushar Imran, Shahriar Nafees

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DateLine: 20th November 2006

 

Bangladesh's selectors on Sunday dropped out-of-form batsmen Mohammad Ashraful and Rajin Saleh from a 13-man squad for the first three one-day internationals against Zimbabwe.

 

"Ashraful and Rajin are not in form and so they have been dropped from the squad," chief selector Faruk Ahmed said.

 

Middle-order batsman Tushar Imran returned to the squad after being ignored for the recent Champions Trophy in India. Zimbabwe will play five one-dayers and a Twenty20 international on their upcoming tour of Bangladesh. The Twenty20 match is on November 28 at Khulna, followed by the first one-dayer at the same venue on November 30.

 

Saleh and Ashraful are among the four Bangladeshi batsmen to score a century in one-day internationals, but have been struggling for runs in recent matches. Ashraful's hundred came in his team's famous victory over world champions Australia in a triangular series match at Cardiff in England last year. He is also the country's youngest batsman to make a Test hundred. Ashraful has scored 1,411 runs in 78 one-day internationals and Saleh 1,005 in 43.

 

Shahriar Nafees, the only Bangladeshi batsman to score two hundreds in one-dayers, will lead the side in the country's first-ever Twenty20 international. He scored an unbeaten 123 - the highest by a Bangladeshi in the shorter version of the game - in his team's victory over Zimbabwe in the Champions Trophy last month.

 

Bangladesh one-day squad: Habibul Bashar (capt), Shahriar Nafees, Khaled Mashud, Aftab Ahmed, Mohammad Rafique, Tushar Imran, Mashrafe Mortaza, Shahadat Hossain, Abdur Razzak, Syed Rasel, Saqibul Hasan, Farhad Reza, Mehrab Hossain. Coach: Dav Whatmore.