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The coach Dav Whatmore is desperate for Bangladesh to avoid a bottom-placed finish in the Super Eights and is hoping for an improved performance against the No. 1-ranked South Africa in Guyana on Saturday. Bangladesh played above expectations in their group matches, but they have failed to keep up the momentum and are without a point after losses to Australia and New Zealand.”We don’t want to finish at the bottom,” Whatmore said. “We are not last in the whole tournament, but we are now at the bottom in the Super Eights. Our objective is always to go higher [than Ireland], but the reality is that we are ranked No. 9 and we will be playing to change the rankings.”Bangladesh lost to Australia by ten wickets and to New Zealand by nine wickets, but Whatmore said the side could do better. “Our objective is to push the opposition and this is what we want to do in the remaining matches,” Whatmore said. Bangladesh face England, West Indies and Ireland after South Africa.”We need to up our performance in the second round,” he said. “What we have done here is something we had not done in the past. We were once considered minnows, but we are no longer minnows now.”We achieved our objective in the first round as we played pretty well to qualify for the second round. We had just one bad game against Sri Lanka, but we played three matches and we deserved to be in the Super Eights.”Whatmore said he was looking forward to a better performance from his batsmen in the remaining matches after they scored 174 against New Zealand and 104 for 6 in 22 overs against Australia. “We need to make more runs,” he said. “We were not able to score upfront in the last two matches.”

Shoaib Malik has been retained as Pakistan’s captain until December 2008 after the PCB extended his current appointment by another year. Malik was made captain in April, following Pakistan’s dismal World Cup performance, originally until December this year.”Malik has shown enough promise to warrant more time as captain,” Nasim Ashraf, the board’s chairman, said. “He has led the team well and all the players are comfortable with him.”We are looking to have continuity in the captaincy as this is instrumental in the improvement of the team. Malik is young and learning and the perfect choice.”The appointment of a vice-captain, however, will be made on a series- to-series basis. Younis Khan, deputy for the tour of India, is the third vice-captain during Malik’s tenure; Mohammad Asif was appointed for the Abu Dhabi ODI series against Sri Lanka, while Salman Butt replaced him for the ICC World Twenty20 and the home series against South Africa.Asif, meanwhile, might be sent to Australia for treatment on the elbow injury which forced him out of the ongoing ODI series in India. He also missed four out of the five ODIs against South Africa last month, and the status and extent of his injury remains uncertain.”We have two reports on his [Asif’s] injury. One specialist says he requires surgery, another feels he can recover without surgery. We have sent his reports to a top specialist in Australia and we are awaiting his response,” Ashraf said.Pakistan are due to play three Tests against India after the ODIs, before taking on Zimbabwe for a five-match ODI series at home in January.

Returning from South Africa after corrective surgery to his elbow, Shoaib Mailk, the Pakistan allrounder, hopes to make it to the team’s tour to England beginning July 1.Malik underwent surgery in Cape Town to improve his bowling action, which had been first declared suspect in October 2004 during the Paktel Cup one-day tournament at home. His doctors in South Africa termed the surgery a success after extracting a `piece of floating bone from his elbow. They were confident that physiotherapy and exercise would help Malik, who complained of pain in his elbow while batting and bowling, recover within four to six weeks.Malik had been in a car accident in 2003 causing the tendons in his arms to loosen. The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) claimed that it was because of this accident that his elbow straightens when he bowls.Meanwhile, Shoaib Akhtar, recovering from a stress fracture to his heel began bowling at the nets in Lahore. His doctor, Tauseef Razzaq, said that Shoaib will begin full training in a month’s time. The PCB expects both bowlers to be fit for the tour to England in July.

Cricket is a mind game above all others with the possible exception of golf, the ultimate masochists’ pursuit. It is something Michael Bevan, the most driven of Australian players, knows only too well. Bevan spent more than a decade trying to prove himself on the world stage while fighting a losing battle against certain perceptions of his batting, notably that he had a weakness against the short ball and was thus the dreaded “one-day specialist”.So when he lost his lucrative Cricket Australia contract at the end of 2003-04 and went back to negotiate the relative pittance of a salary with his beloved New South Wales, his cricketing life reached a genuine flashpoint. He knew his international career was probably finished at 34, unfair as that might have been given his one-day average of 53.58 and a reputation for owning three or four shots to every ball.Always a different card, Bevan chose to pack up and play in Tasmania, who also offered an assistant coaching job. He arrived in Hobart with a mindset that reflected the fact he was no longer required to prove anything to anyone beyond himself. Brian McFadyen, the coach, soon noticed the change. While it was different from before, there was also a familiarity about it. McFadyen, now ensconced as a senior coach at the Centre of Excellence in Brisbane, sensed Bevan wanted to play like he had all those years ago, when it was just another game. In essence, he had gone back to the swashbuckling kid from Canberra who lit up NSW upon his arrival at the end of the 1980s. The result was astonishing. Jamie Cox, the state’s veteran top-order batsman, called it “phenomenal”. McFadyen preferred “out of this world”.Bevan played nine Pura Cup matches for Tasmania in 2004-05 after missing the opening game with an Achilles injury. He made eight centuries, an Australian record for a single season. He accumulated 1,464 runs, breaking the all-time domestic mark of 1,381, which was set only the season before by Matthew Elliott, another left-hander. He averaged 97.60 and Phil Jaques, the next best player, was 273 runs behind. Tasmania’s poor season meant he was no chance of making the final, and combined with his first-game absence four potential hits were sacrificed. It is said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics, but there is no disguising this one. It is a big number, a significant number, and one for the ages.Beginning with a muffled 19 and a magnificent, unbeaten 167 against Victoria at Bellerive Oval, Bevan scarcely stopped to smell the roses. Tasmania’s season at four-day level was dreadful as they finished last in a competition won by NSW. At least they could watch Bevan from the sanctity of the dressing-room. During the second innings he and the feisty all-rounder Damien Wright met at 6 for 46 and put on 215 for the seventh wicket, a record for Tasmania, who defied Victoria for hour after hour. Bevan survived 439 minutes in the maelstrom and was still there when the Bushrangers secured their first win in Hobart for 25 years. Despite the loss, he was on a roll.

A match later he conjured 106 and 100, from only 137 balls, against South Australia as the Tigers won by 195 runs. Around this point McFadyen spotted the change in Bevan’s batting from previous years. “He actually backed himself more,” he says. “I suppose he played with the chains off. I’ve got no doubt he’d played before that with distractions, whether it was national selection, the short ball or a few other things around him.” It was clear that he wanted to bat naturally and fluently, like he had as a teenager. “When he first came on the scene he was aggressive,” McFadyen says. “Like a lot of young players he’s had to temper that to make himself consistent. I reckon the decision he made was instead of being conservative he would throw caution to the wind and see how good he could be.”Twin centuries against the Redbacks were followed by a lean period in the context of his summer: 11 and 93 against Queensland in Brisbane; 21 and 12 against NSW in Sydney; and 42 and 4 in the return match with the Bulls. However, the rest was special. After Tasmania slumped to 3 for 23 against Western Australia at Bellerive Oval in late January, he peeled off a first-innings 190. As they aimed to set the Warriors a target, Bevan hit the ball even better, gleaning an unbeaten 114 out of 5 for 226. Symptomatic of their season, they lost despite setting a monumental 396.The runaway train was still motoring when, confronted by a Victoria attack headed by Shane Warne, he toiled for 434 minutes over 144, then gathered 86 of Tasmania’s limp 198 as they were again defeated. When the Tigers met NSW in Hobart, Bevan smashed an unbeaten 170 against Stuart MacGill and his impressive company. As the Blues rolled to victory on the final day MacGill had his revenge, dismissing Bevan for 26, which was a rare failure on his new home deck.Bellerive Oval has a reputation as a batsman’s paradise, but Bevan was not getting it easy. McFadyen said the curator at the beautiful ground beside the Derwent estuary was urged to prepare “result wickets” and duly delivered. “There was juice left in and the first hour of each first innings was always difficult,” he says. “It was not a traditional batsman-friendly wicket. The scores don’t reflect that because it dried out on the third and fourth days. I can tell you it was bloody difficult.” In the tough conditions, against quality opposition, and on surfaces helping the pace bowlers, Bevan was unflappable. Even McFadyen was slightly surprised. “There’s been a question mark about him when it’s difficult and he’s been labelled a one-day player,” he says. “He did not look like missing a ball, didn’t look like playing and missing for the whole season.”Cox recognised an old look in Bevan’s eye. “I played under-age cricket with Michael and even then he had the aloofness, if you like, that a lot of special players have,” he says. “There’s this zone where they go and you wonder what they’re thinking. You look at them and you know they’re ready to go.” By the final game Bevan’s mind was still churning, and as they arrived in Adelaide he needed another 76 runs to overtake Elliott’s landmark. With 115 and 44 he succeeded in another loss, which won the wooden spoon, and completed a four-game streak of at least one hundred in the world’s toughest domestic competition.The Pura Cup had ended for Tasmania but their season wasn’t entirely over. In the ING Cup final Bevan hit a typically inventive 47 not out from 52 balls that helped them to a famous victory over Queensland, the state’s first one-day trophy since the low-key Gillette Cup in 1978-79. Enjoying a fine season on that stage, too, he captured 519 runs at 86.50. “In the end, it got ridiculous,” Cox says. “We were almost taking it for granted. He’d score a hundred late in the year, and you could see the blokes almost forgetting to pat him on the back.”

Bevan told the media he was still improving, and that he remained hopeful of a berth at the 2007 World Cup. He refused to make a retirement announcement, a fact that surprised no one who knew him well. “I’m a better player than when I was in the Australian side, no doubt about it,” he says. “The World Cup is a long way off but I don’t think it’s out of the question. I hope it isn’t. It’s nice to know that at this stage of my life I’m hitting the ball the best I’ve ever hit it.”All of which must make people wonder why Bevan, the artist and sometimes cantankerous player, completed his international career with only 18 Tests, an average of 29.07, and precisely zero centuries. The answer is in the timing. Bevan played in an era when Australian batting opportunities were limited, a fact the likes of Cox, Jamie Siddons, Stuart Law and even Dean Jones could attest. Then there was the short-ball perception and the associated mind games and battles. Devon Malcolm, the very quick English bowler, made him flinch a couple of times in the 1994-95 Ashes series. Bevan paid a massive price for those moments of discomfort, and the irony was that nearing the end of his career he was flaying the short ball.”It’s a myth, there’s no doubt about it,” Cox says of the weakness-against-the-short-ball theory. “It was exposed on one trip by one bowler. If you watched him last year he pulled and hooked beautifully. People tested him out because they thought he was weak, but he smacked them.”Everyone already knew that Bevan was a fine player and a highly-charged individual. In a sense he was ahead of his time because he did not fit the archetypal Australian cricket legend of the beer-swilling man’s man, the image cultivated by the Chappells, Lillee, Marsh and Walters. He was a gym rat and a fitness fanatic long before it became the norm of the modern professionals. What was not so widely known was that his hunger was undiminished by the vagaries of selection and the bodyblow of losing his contract.”His strength is his ability to remain focussed on the job at hand,” McFadyen says, “but he probably expects that of everyone.” While he has been labelled as difficult – not quite normal – last season he was a role model who would spend a couple of hours on the bowling machine the day before a game.Sitting back watching the show, McFadyen reasoned that if Bevan was picked for Australia again he would thrive. It probably won’t happen, but it’s a nice thought. “Most of us who witnessed it felt his batting was as good as anything we’d ever seen,” he says. “It wasn’t just one or two performances, it was every time he went out. It was out of this world.”

North Division

Scotland pulled off a sensational two-run win over Lancashire at Old Trafford despite only scoring 155 for 9. The shock came a week after they had been skittled for 74 in the reverse fixture. Steven Croft took 4 for 24 as Scotland struggled for runs, and Andrew Flintoff chipped in with 2 for 13. Lancashire’s innings fell apart as they crumpled to 44 for 7 before Luke Sutton and Kyle Hogg put on 71 for the eighth wicket. Eight were needed from the last over, and James Anderson needed to hit a boundary off the last ball but Gordon Drummond restricted him to a single.Click here for John Ward’s report of Yorkshire’s match against Durham at Headingley.

South/West Division

In a rain-affected match at New Road, Vikram Solanki powered Worcestershire to a seven-wicket win over Glamorgan with a slick 88 from 84 balls which included five sixes. He and Stephen Moore put on an unbeaten 58 for the fourth wicket to guide Worcestershire to their target of 186, with nine balls to spare, and Ben Smith chipped in with a valuable 34-ball 41. In a match reduced to 28 overs, Glamorgan’s Tom Maynard – son of Matthew – top-scored with 48 from just 29 balls, while Jamie Dalrymple cracked 44 from 31, but they hadn’t counted on Solanki’s explosive hitting.

Midlands Division

A superb 102 from Stephen Peters helped Northamptonshire ease past Ireland by eight wickets at Northampton. Ireland could only muster 203 for 9 in their fifty overs, though Paul Stirling – the very highly regarded 17-year-old – top-scored with 70 from 95 balls, including four fours and four sixes. It was never a total to trouble Northamptonshire, however, and Peters found excellent support in Niall O’Brien, their pugnacious Irish batsman, who made 75. Northamptonshire lost two wickets but Peters saw them home in the 43rd over.Ryan Cummins took 3 for 21 in a disciplined bowling performance for Leicestershire who beat Warwickshire by 45 runs at Edgbaston. In a match reduced to 23 overs, Leicestershire compiled 148 for 6 thanks to thirties from Jacques Du Toit, Jim Allenby and Boeta Dippenaar, but it was their bowlers who swung the match. Cummins removed Neil Carter for 3 while Garnett Kruger picked up the key wickets of Ian Westwood and Jonathan Trott. Tim Ambrose gave the hosts hope with 28 from 31, but there was little else from the lower-order and Warwickshire were dismissed for just 103.

South East Division

Chris Adams led from the front with a perfectly timed 109 from 103 balls to guide Sussex to a comfortable win over Middlesex at Hove, chasing down a sizeable 274 with 12 balls to spare. Middlesex’s 273 was set-up by a slick 80 from Ed Joyce, which contained 12 fours, and a typically industrious 68 from Owais Shah. Middlesex’s bowling is their weakest suit, however, and none of their pace attack settled into any kind of rhythm. Matt Prior crashed 79 from 92 balls, sharing in a second-wicket stand of 81 with Adams. But it was Adams’ partnership of 115 with Murray Goodwin which really put the match out of Middlesex’s reach, as Adams took them home with 12 balls in hand.Click here for Brydon Coverdale’s report of Kent’s 90-run win over Surrey at The Oval.

Scorecard

Trinidad and Tobago secured a berth in the semi-finals of the Stanford 20/20 tournament with a comprehensive 46-run win against Barbados. In a match postponed by a day because of rain, T&T eased to victory as Barbados folded up for 96 chasing a target of 143. The Trinidad duo of Nicholas Ramjass, the left-arm spinner, and Keiron Pollard, the medium pacer, shared six wickets between them and skittled out the last five Barbados wickets for only 17 runs.Earlier, Barbados sent Trinidad in to bat and the openers William Perkins and Mario Belcon got off to a good start, adding 69. However, they were pegged back by a double strike by West Indies fast bowler Ian Bradshaw, who got the important wickets of Perkins and Daren Ganga. With the score at 79 for 4, Shazam Babwah resurrected the innings with 25, taking his side to 142 for 9. Bradshaw was the pick of the bowlers with three wickets while Fidel Edwards chipped in with two.Barbados stumbled early, losing both openers by the fourth over, before Jason Haynes and Floyd Reifer got things going with a 28-run stand for the third wicket. However, they succumbed to some tight bowling and fielding, with Haynes edging a wide delivery to the wicketkeeper. Ramjass and Pollard then took over to dismiss Barbados cheaply, with the last seven batsmen failing to get into double figures.Trinidad will meet Nevis in the semi-final on August 11.
Scorecard

Guyana held their nerve in a tense encounter against Jamaica to reach the semi-finals of the Stanford 20/20 tournament with a three-wicket win. Requiring 38 with three wickets in hand, Imran Khan and Andre Percival guided Guyana home with an over to spare.Jamaica opted to bat first in a match postponed from Friday due to rain, and posted a challenging 163 for 6, with contributions by Chris Gayle, Marlon Samuels and Wavell Hinds. Esuan Crandon led the reply with 71, an innings which contained 12 fours and a six. Guyana were going along well before Jermaine Lawson pegged them back with three quick wickets. Crandon kept his side in the game but Jamaica sensed an opportunity after his dismissal, with the score at 126 for 7. However, Khan and Percival played positively to take their side homeGuyana will meet Grenada in their semi-final on August 10.

Scorecard and ball-by-ball details
How they were out

Shane Warne inspired Rajasthan Royals to a sensational come-from-behind win against Deccan Chargers by capping outstanding leadership and canny bowling with a 17-run charge in the last over.The three-wicket victory – which was decided, for the second successive day, off the penultimate ball of the match – made Rajasthan the first team in the IPL to chase down a 200-plus score. They now lie fourth with four points from three games while Deccan, for whom Andrew Symonds scored a century and bowled the fateful final over, lost their third match in a row and remain at the bottom of the table.In the penultimate over, it had seemed Rajasthan were out of the chase with RP Singh effecting two dismissals and conceding only six runs. Before that Shahid Afridi and Symonds had bowled in tandem to keep the scoring under check between overs 12 and 14, but Mohammad Kaif changed all that in the next where he hit three sixes off Symonds. Afridi dismissed Shane Watson, Kaif and Graeme Smith and conceded only 28 runs. But having exhausted his main bowlers, VVS Laxman was forced to turn to Symonds for the decisive last over.That began with the odds stacked against Rajasthan. Pankaj Singh took three off the first two balls before giving the strike to Warne. He then hit a four over Symonds’ head, leaving ten to get off the last three balls. Warne needed just two of them, off which he hit consecutive sixes to spark scenes of wild celebrations among his team-mates.What set up the chase, though, was the 98-run partnership between Yusuf Pathan and Smith. The two were mindful of the run-rate they had to maintain right from the start and went past 100 in 8.3 overs, which made Rajasthan the fastest side to get to that figure in the tournament.Yusuf belied his lithe frame to get the ball into the stands several times while recording the fastest fifty of the tournament. He didn’t move his feet much but used all his strength as he reached out and swung his bat at everything. He fell in similar fashion, not moving his feet when he reached for a wide one off D Kalyankrishna and found Symonds at long-off. Smith was more conventional though equally attacking. He drove down the ground and cut behind third man for boundaries.Test cricket had been unlucky not to witness Warne as captain. Before his last-over heroics, he used his bowlers effectively to dent Deccan’s start. He brought on Yusuf in the third over – to replace Munaf Patel, who went for 12 in his opening effort – and was rewarded with the wickets of Adam Gilchrist and Afridi. Though Symonds more than made up for the poor start, Rajasthan’s target could have been much higher had Gilchrist built on his three fours. Warne also made Yusuf bat at No. 3 for the second game in a row, after getting him to open in their first match.Laxman’s captaincy was very poor in comparison – his decision to open the innings with Gilchrist failed, as did his bowling change in the sixth over to bring on left-arm spinner Pragyan Ojha, who went for 16 runs. But even Warne had no tricks against Symonds, who showed his two initial failures were blips with an innings that included powerful straight fours and sixes mostly by making room in the crease.He did not indulge in unconventional strokes – except a short ball that he pulled tennis-style late in the innings – and stuck mostly to back-foot drives and flicks. He reached his half-century off 29 balls and then took only 18 more to get to the fastest hundred of the tournament. His 111-run partnership with Rohit Sharma, who scored a half-century in the previous match, ruined the Rajasthan bowlers’ early efforts. Now Deccan will have to rethink their bowling strategies after losing a game that was firmly in their grasp.

Mahela Jayawardene, the Sri Lankan captain, has blamed his side’s poor batting for the series loss to England after conceding an unbeatable 3-1 lead with one match to play. A comfortable five-wicket win at the Premadasa Stadium sealed England’s first ODI triumph in the subcontinent since 1987.”I don’t think we’ve batted well for the last three games,” said Jayawardene. “One or two individuals have been having good days but we’ve not been batting as a unit to put runs on the board for the bowlers to bowl at.”He admitted England were the better side and that they deserved to win the series. “Losing matches is not easy for us, especially at home, but credit should go to England because they’ve played some really good cricket. Some of their players have performed really well and they’ve basically outplayed us in the last few games.”Paul Collingwood, the England captain, termed his side’s comeback “unbelievable” after they won their first one-day series in Sri Lanka despite losing the series opener.”Before we came here a lot of people wrote us off. We lost that first game and the way the lads have bounced back has been unbelievable. They’ve learnt and adapted new skills and showed a lot of character.”I am very, very proud and it was a very proud moment when we knocked those runs off. I’m proud of all the players that have been involved and the management have been fantastic.”He said the series victory against India had given the team a lot of confidence.”We knew the areas we needed to improve and the key has been the belief we have built up over the last few weeks, especially the India series which was a big thing for us – that belief was not going to go after one game.”Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen scored half-centuries to help England coast to victory after the bowlers had restricted Sri Lanka to 211.

Canada Under-19s routed Fiji Under-19s by eight wickets in a comfortable win in their 15th place playoff game in Cox’s Bazar, after bowling them out for 83. Canada needed 20 overs to knock off the target of 84.Fiji got off to a solid start after being inserted to bat, with the openers putting on 26 in 34 balls. Things fell apart thereafter, and they were soon bundled out for 83 in 28 overs. Opener Delaimatuku Maraiwai was the top-scorer with 14. Miraj Patel produced figures of 4 for 16, while Shlok Patel returned 3 for 18 from his 10 overs.Canada’s openers put on 58 in 84 balls, with Akash Gill making a patient 38. Fiji used seven bowlers, but only two of them could claim a wicket.Michael van Lingen starred with bat and ball, guiding Namibia Under-19s to a 15-run win against Nepal Under-19s in Fatullah. The victory ensured Namibia finished seventh in the tournament and automatically qualified for the 2018 World Cup. Namibia, after opting to bat, lost Niko Davin off the first ball, but half-centuries from Lohan Louwrens (59) and van Lingen (58) powered the team to 225 for 9 from 45 overs. That total was also built on the back of a 99-run partnership for the sixth wicket between van Lingen and Francois Rautenbach.Nepal began their chase well, courtesy a 97-run, second-wicket partnership between Sunil Dhamala (59) and Yogendra Singh Karki, but quick blows from van Lingen (4 for 24) and Fritz Coetzee (3 for 34) soon reduced them to 113 for 4. Nepal once again led a recovery through Aarif Sheikh and Dipendra Singh Airee, but the dismissal of Aarif in the 36th over thwarted the team’s momentum; as they eventually folded for 210.

The team of Pakistani investigators, which went to Jamaica to investigate Bob Woolmer’s murder, has finalised its report and will be submitting it to the government today. The two-member team was dispatched from Pakistan on the request of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB).According to a member of the Pakistani investigation team, Mir Zubair Mahmood, left for Islamabad along with Kaleem Imam, additional director-FIA Islamabad, and will present the report to the federal secretary of Interior Ministry, Kamal Shah. The investigation team arrived in Jamaica on April 10 and there in collaboration with Scotland Yard and Jamaican police investigated the case for two weeks up to April 26.Mahmood said that the Jamaican police and the Scotland Yard officials fully cooperated with the team during the investigation. According to the sources of the investigation team, various aspects of the murder case were discussed in Jamaica. The most important among them was the involvement of bookies in Woolmer’s murder, often cited as the prime reason behind his murder.