While Bangladesh may have won hearts with their performance in the one-off Test against India, were they ever really close to winning the game? And is that cause for celebration?

The social media chatter started early on the fifth day. Bangladesh were being lauded for their performance in Hyderabad. They had ostensibly done better than the teams which had come before them – South Africa, New Zealand and England.

The timing of the posts gave one food for thought: There was not really a way for Bangladesh to win the match. The required run-rate required was too high. Wickets were falling fairly regularly as well. The only way to sneak a draw out was to bat out the day and that was easier said than done.

None of the other teams had managed that and Bangladesh would not do that either. The Indians wrapped up the match and the series in the second session with the visitors throwing their wickets away.

In the end, they lost by over 200 runs. Yet sympathetic fans pointed out the statistic that the Indians had to bowl more than over 200 overs to get rid of the Bangladesh batsmen twice. What remains unstated is a set of assumptions dictating such statements.

STAT: 201 overs batted by Bangladesh is the most by them in a Test against India.

PRE: 200 in Dhaka in their inaugural Test in 2000#IndvBan — Cricbuzz (@cricbuzz) February 13, 2017

A bit too much?

The primary assumption is that the Bangladeshis were expected to be bowled out within three days. It is because Bangladesh did not fall down like dominoes immediately that they have received plaudits.

Praise here is a mere coating to the sense of condescension that was dominant before the match and will have solidified by now. The Bangladesh captain will, even in this age of social media dominated attention deficit disorder, not be forgotten anytime soon for his premature celebrations in his team’s World Twenty20 match against India in 2016. His wildly inaccurate Decision Review System appeal in the first innings against Virat Kohli trended more than the highlights of his century.

His second innings dismissal — a rather ill-advised charge down the wicket against Ashwin — showed that the team’s temperament wasn’t quite where it should be. They needed to bat out the day to save the game. Instead, he succumbed to the pressure and played a false shot. The fact that almost all of their series are two-match affairs gets lost in the swirl of two Test tours that a lot of teams undertake now.

India were hardly ever challenged

Bangladesh, for all their said heroics with the bat, could not prevent a loss that was seemed destined after India’s performance in the first innings. That is the true tale of this series.

If Bangladesh had been able to play as many Test matches as the other teams did, chances are that things would have got much tougher. Sport allows for seemingly benign statements supporting the underdog but one must see the timing and context of those lines to truly judge if they are not just another form of rapping on the knees of the vanquished.

Bangladesh’s decent performances against New Zealand and England get overlooked amidst this kind of superficial praise and they should not. These were performances which gave them a real chance of winning and, in one case, actually managed to take it over the line.

If Bangladesh really want to move forward, they need to discard this ‘encouragement’. It reminds one of the kind of praise England would heap on India for the first twenty years of India-England engagements in the Test circuit. These kind words died swiftly after India’s first win.

Indeed, one hopes that Bangladesh takes this praise at just face value and focus on replicating the good stuff over and over again. At the end of the day, a draw is good but nothing is sweeter than a victory.