'Litton is still one of our best batters': Shanto backs out-of-form batter to be back in runs
"He is a very important player for us, still one of our best batters. Yes, there have been a few poor innings. But we should stick to him during this bad patch," Shanto said in the press conference.
Bangladesh batters had horrendous outing in both innings of their crushing 328-run defeat against Sri Lanka at Sylhet. But what caught everyone's eyes was Litton Das' continued poor form, especially that whimsical dismissal in the second innings just before the closing of the third day's play.
Litton has awfully been out of form in the ongoing Sri Lanka series. He has been dismissed for a duck four times in the seven innings in the series so far in all three formats with only two double-digit scores. He was dropped from the final ODI in Chattogram before being called up for the Test series where he failed miserably again.
But the skipper Najmul Hossain Shanto has backed Litton in the post-match press conference hoping he will be back to scoring runs in the next Test in Chattogram.
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"He is a very important player for us, still one of our best batters. Yes, there have been a few poor innings. But we should stick to him during this bad patch," Shanto said in the press conference.
"Everyone in the team is supporting him. I'm really hopeful that he will score runs in the next match," the skipper added.
Shanto also talked about his own dismissal in the second innings where he gave his wicket away trying to chase a wide delivery.
"I chose a wrong delivery (to play the shot). As a top order batter, I should have let that go. I think it was a misjudgement."
Shanto admitted batting failure was the primary reason behind a crushing defeat against Sri Lanka in the first Test. He didn's show any excuse for that apart from the batters' failure but hoped the team will turn things around in Chattogram.
"Whatever the margin, a loss is a loss. In both innings, the top-order didn't score runs. Not just us, both team's top-order struggled. But we don't want to use that as an excuse. We need to work on how we can improve from here," Shanto said.
Even after the humiliating defeat, Shanto was adamant that the Tigers have gotten better in the red-ball format but admitted that the rate of improvement is really slow.
"After the New Zealand match, we were hearing that we have improved a lot, we have done well a lot of things have changed for the better. Even many members of the media had said so."
"So, we can't say that there has been no change. You can say that things haven't changed as much as it should've. We need to improve much more from now on," he concluded.
