Towhid Hridoy came into the Bangladesh national team with the promise of being the beacon of middle-order reliability, and his early days showed signs of exactly that. A 92 on debut against Ireland in ODIs, then played pretty well consistently, at least by Bangladeshi standards. He took down Wanindu Hasaranga in the T20 World Cup and became an instant hero.
He is still the most consistent Bangladesh batter, averaging 37.19 in ODIs and 28.66 in T20Is, but if you watch him, you immediately notice two glaring issues.
The first is pretty obvious. Whenever he is facing balls directed towards his pads, his head falls over, ruining his balance and leading to dismissals.
The other issue, though, is not talked about enough, which is weakness against left-arm spin. As a right-handed batter, any left-arm spinner should be a good matchup, but because Hridoy is so leg-side dominant, he becomes a run desert whenever a left-arm spinner comes to bowl.
While he doesn’t get out to them a whole lot, his numbers, in almost every other metric, drop significantly. In ODIs, his batting strike rate against left-arm spinners drops to 60.9 compared to 82.5 against all other bowling, and it drops to 118.3 compared to 128.6 against other bowlers in T20Is.
He also takes more balls to hit a boundary. Against all other bowlers, he hits a boundary every 7.4 balls in T20Is and 14.1 balls in ODIs; however, against left-arm spinners, he takes 8.5 balls in T20Is and 28.9 balls in ODIs to hit a boundary.
While he gets out less to left-arm spinners in ODIs (93 balls per dismissal against SLA v 47 against all others), he does get out more to them in T20Is (17 balls per dismissal against SLA v 26 against all others), presumably because of the onus to attack.
Amongst all the left-arm bowlers he has faced in ODIs, Hridoy only managed to emulate his career strike rate (77.9) against only one spinner - New Zealand’s Jayden Lennox (76.7). The numbers, though, are better in T20Is, as he has scored at a faster rate than his career strike rate against six left-arm spinners.
In all of his innings against left-arm spin in ODIs, he has only managed to score faster than run-a-ball twice in 30 innings - against Ireland’s Matthew Humphreys (10 runs off seven balls) and Afghanistan’s Zia-ur-Rehman (10 off nine balls).
Hridoy’s stats seem even more surprising because of the abundance of left-arm spinners in Bangladesh, and because it seems like wrist spin - something Bangladesh batters find trouble against - bothers him less than the one he has faced way more throughout his career.
Bangladesh have a lot of hope in Hridoy, making him the white-ball vice-captain. However, without improvement against left-arm spin, it’s only a matter of time before his numbers dwindle even further, and all that promise gets lost.
[All the data was collected from cricsheet.org and espncricinfo.com, following which the data was analysed using AI.]
[[The interactive graphics used in this story were produced by Claude, and belongs to the author.]]