Southampton: Bangladesh’s highest total in One Day Internationals was not enough to down Australia at Trent Bridge on Thursday, but the team are delighted with the way they chased and fought back. Australia posted a mammoth 381-5, and remarkably Bangladesh were short by only 48 runs.

Bangladesh do not get enough matches against the big teams on a regular basis and, through this performance, they have announced that they too are entertainers in cricket and need to be invited for more series.

Bangladesh skipper Mashrafe Mortaza hailed his batsmen and said: “We need to play more to be able to score the big runs. Despite all that 330 is not a bad effort. Our batsmen are showing their courage. Almost everyone has been batting with some intent. As I said, we don’t get to play that much.”

According to Mortaza, although David Warner played a great knock, it was Glenn Maxwell who took the game away from them.

“I think the damage was done by Maxwell [32 runs in 10 balls],” he said. “That was the big factor as well.”

He then went on to reveal how tough it was to bowl at a batsman like Warner on such a wicket.

“We were aware that on this sort of wicket it is always difficult to bowl to a player like him,” he added. “We knew that if we do not get wickets it will be difficult. An that is exactly what happened.”

Mortaza then explained in detail how the match slipped away from their hands.

“Both sides wanted to bat first,” he said. “And obviously, we created a few chances, which could have been taken against this big side. You need to convert those 50/50 chances, I think. Things could have been different then. So not getting wickets at that particular time was the key thing. And they also knew that if they did not give the wicket much air, they can damage us.”

And he also does not believe that his bowlers failed.

“We knew this would be a high-scoring match, especially the ground we played today,” he said. “It [the target] should have been 300-280. That’s what we’ve been asking. But, again, both our matches, against England and today went to 380. So it has been a lot for the batters. Anything around 300- 320 is really good on this wicket, so our batting was really good.”