Toss India opt to bowl v Bangladesh
Heavy rain delayed the start of the Asia Cup final by two hours © AFP
India’s captain MS Dhoni opted to bowl after heavy rain reduced the Asia Cup final between Bangladesh and India to a 15-overs per side match. Play was rescheduled to 9:30pm local time, exactly two hours after the scheduled start.
Harbhajan Singh, Pawan Negi and Bhuvneshwar Kumar made way for R Ashwin, Ashish Nehra and Ravindra Jadeja in the India XI while Bangladesh brought in left-arm seamer Abu Hider and allrounder Nasir Hossain for their first games of the tournament. This meant that Arafat Sunny and Mohammad Mithun were benched.
The pitch, hard with no grass, was expected to be good for batting, as it had been during the last few matches of the tournament. While the Shere Bangla National Stadium’s drainage system did a fine job to take out all the puddles, it was the groundstaff who mopped up the outfield quickly.
Clouds had started to gather from around 5:30pm before it grew into a storm, locally known as the Kal Boishakhi which is quite usual during spring time in Bangladesh. Rain only relented by 7:40pm. During this period, there were several blackouts, but the 10,000-odd crowd braved the storm before the toss took place at 9:10pm.
Bangladesh: 1 Tamim Iqbal, 2 Soumya Sarkar, 3 Sabbir Rahman, 4 Mushfiqur Rahim (wk), 5 Shakib Al Hasan, 6 Mahmudullah, 7 Nasir Hossain, 8 Mashrafe Mortaza (capt), 9 Al-Amin Hossain, 10 Abu Hider, 11 Taskin Ahmed
India: 1 Shikhar Dhawan, 2 Rohit Sharma, 3 Virat Kohli, 4 Suresh Raina, 5 Yuvraj Singh, 6 MS Dhoni (capt and wk), 7 Hardik Pandya, 8 Ravindra Jadeja, 9 R Ashwin, 10 Ashish Nehra, 11 Jasprit Bumrah
Mohammad Isam is ESPNcricinfo’s Bangladesh correspondent. @isam84
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Source: ESPN Crickinfo