I don’t quite know what to make of it all now. 48 hours ago, I was riding high, as I’m sure most other Banglaeshis were, on the team’s stellar performances in the Caribbean. A cracking victory against India, a job well done against Bermuda to qualify for the Super 8’s, an absolute dream performance culminating in possibly the most glorious day of our sporting history, and about thirty runs short of embarassing England. That would have more than done for me. Until that punch-drunk performance against Ireland yesterday. Its taken a bit of the shine off. If we had managed to win that one, the World Cup would have been complete, and we would have left no observer in doubt that we had definitively arrived as a force to be reckoned with. Now we’re not quite so sure.

Regardless of the outcome against the West Indies, I think where we stand in world cricket right now is this: We are at a point now where no team in the world can afford to take us easily. Whereas in the past they may have been able to get away with it, nowadays they will be punished. Given the inch, we will take the mile. That is progress.

At the same time however, we ourselves are not yet at the point where we can take any of the likes of Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ireland, etc easily. We have established that we did deserve to be the 10th Test playing nation, and we are probably better than Zimbabwe at this point, but we still have some way to go before we can claim they are not even in our league. At the moment, our place in the cricketing hierarchy is akin to an island that is smack in the middle of the ocean dividing the elite from the mediocre. We can go away from the Caribbean with a lot to take from the tournament, but we must equally seek lessons from it as well. How we balance the two will largely determine which way we drift in the future.