WE PUT IN OUR BEST TO REVERSE THE BALL: BEN STROKES

Ben Strokes after scoring a very useful 85 runs for his team against the in-form Bangladesh team on Saturday, the lad confessed the fact that he was willing strongly to get some runs and not to give away his wicket.

He gave up a handy contribution to the England team by scoring 85 runs of 151 balls and finally came up to end up the session and the days play at 228 for 8 wickets.

At a particular stage everything seemed so hazy from the England’s point of view as because they were struggling at 62/5 after than Strokes joined hands with Bairstow and kept the moment going at least to have something to fight for.  “I’m making sure I don’t fall into the trap of batting for 20 minutes and then losing concentration on what I’m actually trying to do,” Stokes said.

“We can all hit boundaries, but the hardest thing to do is defend when you first come in. I didn’t want to give my wicket away and made sure if I was going to get out it was going to take a good ball.” 

Strokes also came out with his flow that being on the pitch for a longer period of time helped him to play his natural shots and he then settled down to score a big contribution for the team. “I knew that if we kept rotating the strike, the game was going to get easier,” he said. “There was so much time left in the game that it was just a matter of occupying the crease, rotating the strike and putting the bad balls away.

“The guys around the bat would soon disappear. The longer you spend on wickets like that, the easier it becomes. If we can get through the tough periods – and there are going to be plenty here and in India – then the easier it’s going to get. I tried to put the foot on the gas towards the end to try and get the lead up as high as we could but I’m happy with how it went.”

But it was just not the end of the Strokes Masterstroke after being bullying the opponent with the bat he then came up with the bowl and snapped up the Bangladesh team for 248. Strokes used the reverse swing as a weapon of his battle and at the end he took 4/26.

“Reverse swing is a massive weapon for us in the sub-continent,” he said. “It can be quite tough to control how much the ball is going to swing. But we’ve been working a lot on reverse. We were very critical about keeping the ball in good nick. Joe Root has been non-stop in keeping the smooth side smooth and shiny and making sure the other side is as dry as possible. It’s tough to tell the spinners to keep their hands off with the amount of bowling they are doing, but they did a really good job.

“It’s actually very tough to maintain the ball because one little bit of moisture on the side that we keep dry can almost put you back two overs to where you started off. We all know that and we try to keep as few hands on the ball as possible. We did that and that’s how we managed to get as much sideways movement as we did with the old ball.”