After suffering heavy defeats in consecutive matches against England and New Zealand, Bangladesh now have a brief window to do some self-reflection about what went wrong in those games before their next match in the ICC ODI World Cup against hosts India on October 19.

Top-order failure, too much shuffling in the batting order, pacers not providing wickets upfront - these are coming up as the primary reasons behind their poor start.

But a look at the stats reveals that there is another crucial factor that has hurt Bangladesh dearly so far in the tournament: failure to form big partnerships.

In the first 12 matches in the World Cup, there have already been 13 century partnerships, with a couple of them surpassing the 200-run mark.

Seven out of the 10 participating teams have scored at least one hundred partnership in the tournament.

Besides Bangladesh, the Netherlands and Australia are the other two teams who still don't have a century stand and unsurprisingly, all three teams currently find themselves in the bottom half of the points table.

Bangladesh so far have put up three 50-plus partnerships, one each in their three games.

The biggest of them came in Friday's match against New Zealand, when Shakib Al Hasan and Mushfiqur Rahim added 97 runs for the fifth wicket to repair the innings after yet another batting collapse.

Consistently forming big partnerships is always a crucial factor in ICC events, where the wickets are usually sporting and runs, more often than not, flow off the bat.

However, forming big partnerships against quality sides in ODIs has been an issue for the Tigers for some time.

So far this year, Bangladesh have had eight century stands in 23 ODIs. Five of those came against Ireland while one each came against Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.

Interestingly, Towhid Hridoy, who has been pushed down the order in the World Cup to make way for Mushfiqur and Shakib higher up in the middle-order, was part of four of those eight century partnerships.

If anything, Bangladesh's first three matches have shown that the current think tank is more than willing to shuffle around the batting line-up.

Now, it's up to the management to go back to the drawing board and draw up a batting line-up which will give Bangladesh the best chance to string together some big partnerships, preferably in the top-order.