Bangladesh openers’ musical chairs to continue?

The second and final Test between Bangladesh and the West Indies will begin today in Jamaica with the visitors likely to shake up their playing eleven after suffering a crushing 201-run defeat in the opening fixture last week.

The match will take place at the Sabina Park Stadium, a venue known to be pacer-friendly, which could prompt the management to add speedster Nahid Rana on the side.

But the bigger headache for the think tank would be the batting line-up, which has been short of runs since the Pakistan tour in August.

In the first Test in Antigua, Jaker Ali and Mominul Haque hit fifties while Liton Das and Mehedi Hasan Miraz hit one 40-plus knock each but openers Mahmudul Hasan Joy and Zakir Hasan hardly contributed, which could result in either one of them losing their spot to Shadman Islam.

These three batters -- Joy, Zakir, and Shadman -- have taken turns in the opening slots for the last 12 Tests for Bangladesh, but none of them have been able to lock down a permanent position or provide the team with stability at the top.

The pair of Joy and Zakir opened the innings in the first five of the 12 Tests and then again got together for the first Test against the West Indies.

None of their 14 opening partnerships crossed the 50-run mark, with their highest stand being 47, which came in the Chattogram Test against Sri Lanka this March.

The Joy-Zakir opening partnership averaged a mere 19.50 -- which is not even the worst among the three opening combos between the trio.

After Joy got injured playing for the 'A' team in the buildup to the Pakistan series, Shadman replaced him and joined Zakir at the top and this duo lasted for the next four Tests.

This duo produced two half-century partnerships -- a 58-run stand in the second Test against Pakistan and a 62-run stand in the first Test against India. The pair averaged 30.125 -- the highest of the three.

In the home series against South Africa, Joy returned in place of Zakir, creating an opening combo with Shadman which lasted two Tests. Their partnership averaged a mere 9.33 and the highest of their four stands was 15, which came in the second Test against South Africa.

Individually, all three enjoyed sporadic successes in this period, but lacked consistency. Joy and Shadman have a couple of half-centuries to their names while Zakir has hit three.

Consistency-wise, however, Zakir has been the worst of the three, averaging only 16.75, followed by Joy (22.625) and Shadman (23.09).

The recent stats indicate that dropping Joy and adding Shadman should statistically improve Bangladesh's returns from the first wicket stand and the management could very well follow this logic while naming the eleven in the Jamaica Test.

But at the same time, the individual averages show that there is nothing much between them, indicating that playing any two of them would not have any dramatic effect on Bangladesh's batting, not something a team would like to think of right before a Test where they want to avoid a clean-sweep.