'We simply were not good enough' - Whatmore

Dav Whatmore, Bangladesh's coach, has said that Bangladesh were not good enough to beat Zimbabwe. Bangladesh lost the five-match series with a game to play after losing the fourth match by seven wickets at Harare on Friday.

"We simply were not good enough. We allowed them to win two matches as we could not sustain pressure," Whatmore, who at the start of the series said Bangladesh were favourites, told tigercricket.com. This was Bangladesh's fourth defeat in a bilateral series against Zimbabwe.

Khaled Mashud, stand-in captain for the injured Habibul Bashar in the third and fourth ODIs, blamed the batsmen for the defeat. "There was little we could do with that sort of total. It was good batting conditions and our batters just failed to capitalize on a position tailor-made for us," said Mashud. "The batting has let us down. If you look at the four matches I think we threw away 90 % of our wickets. In the first game we could have had 260 odd and in the third we should have really taken the game away from them after reaching 174 for 3 in the 32nd over. The fielding many would say was not up to the mark but I think we lost with the batting."

"When they [Zimbabwe] won the first game that put the pressure back on us and when they came back from the dead to win the third match confidence-wise they were on top. They held a mental edge over us and we were the side under pressure. However, I still believe that we have more quality than Zimbabwe but sadly we were nowhere near our best in this series.

"My message to the players is that they should try to perform individually in the next game and in the series against Kenya and that would in turn benefit the team. We just have to look ahead as we have lots of matches to come in the coming months."

Bangladesh play Kenya in three one-day internationals at Nairobi beginning on August 12.