Tough day in the field for Bangladeshis

A mountainous third wicket stand of 265 runs by Matt Horne (178) and Aaron Barnes (95) all but squeezed the life out of the Bangladesh bowlers on the second day of their four-day game against Auckland on the Eden Park outer oval today.

Auckland, who started the day at 79 for two (in reply to Bangladesh's modest 120 yesterday), batted through the day to 404 for five wickets, with the 20-year-old Nick Horsley, in his first big season, poised on 57 not out to do some more damage to the beleaguered Bangladeshis tomorrow.

During a day which started an hour late for rain and did not end until 7pm, Auckland scored 325 runs for the loss of three wickets from the 89 overs the long-suffering tour bowlers delivered.

Some of the few hundred spectators might have expected Auckland to close their second innings last evening, 200-plus ahead and with two days to arrange some excitement tomorrow and on Saturday.

However, Brooke Walker, the Auckland skipper, took the more logical step to bat on for many of his players are short of batting practice and Horsley, especially, deserved the chance to show more of his batting riches tomorrow.

Also, there is no guarantee that the Auckland bowlers who destroyed the tourists' batting on the bowler-friendly pitch yesterday, will have similar quick success when the Bangladeshis bat again.

In fact the pitch by then might be so lifeless, slow of pace and low of bounce that the Bangladesh batsmen might think they have received an early Christmas present of the lifeless slabs on which they play so much of their home cricket.

Even before today's play Horne, then 34 not out, lamented that early-summer pitches in New Zealand seldom had the accurate and predictable bounce and ample speed that batsmen in other countries, and especially Australia, enjoy.

It might be possible to survive for long periods of time on December pitches in New Zealand, but Horne maintained that they did not encourage batting strokes and, once the early life had gone, they could not be regarded as the bowlers' friends, either.

But, being such a painstaking and sensible batsman, Horne (who found at the end of his marvellous innings that the unchanged New Zealand team for the first Test did not include him) built a most imposing innings, a concentrated mixture of tight defence and strokes as free and frequent as the pitch and persistent bowling would allow.

The pity is that the national selectors decided to pick their team before Horne batted, rather than name it while he was in full flight. The selectors may have a case that a big century against such a modest attack might not be rated A1 in Lloyd's quality, but Horne still offered some penetrating evidence that he is not far from his Test-class best.

This was his 19th first-class century, it took him 372 minutes and 277 balls (including 23 fours and four sixes) and the pity of it was that toward the end he lost Barnes as his faithful partner through a dreadful out mixup.

Barnes, normally a bit of a swashbuckler, did more buckling than swashing as he played straight and prudently kept the ball on the ground. His 95 followed his 57 not out against Central Districts in November and the 292-minute search for solid runs suggests Barnes' youthful promise is on the point of bearing promise.

The best thing that could be said was that the Bangladesh bowlers stuck gamely to the task of trying to keep the Aucklanders in check. Their principal seam bowlers Mohammad Sharif and the left-arm Manjural Islam were quite nippy with the new ball, but they could not carry all the burden.

Khaled Mahmud, a medium-pacer, was a workaday trier, but not exactly in Test class. Enamul Haque, the senior left-arm spinner had some good moments, when he seemed to get turn and sometimes an awkward bounce. But the pitch gave him little help, and one got the impression that Enamul might lose some of his gloss under heavy-hitting pressure.

Mohammad Ashraful, who looks like he is playing hookey from jockey apprentice school, had three costly overs of leg-spin, and his Test-match quality may be somewhere in the future.