Agar: I believe we can chase any target

Australia spinner Ashton Agar believes they can turn the first Test match around, despite being in the backfoot against Bangladesh after day two in Mirpur’s Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium on Monday. The Aussies were bundled out for 217 runs and the Tigers finished the day on 45 for the loss of Soumya Sarkar’s wicket, a lead of 88 on a turning wicket. Anything around 250 could be a challenging total to chase on a spinning track like this where 21 wickets fell in the first two days. "I believe that we can chase anything because I think we can bowl them out pretty quickly [Tuesday]. It's going to be hard, any lead is competitive out there at the moment with the way the wicket's going, but I'm sure our batters will all learn from our first innings,” Agar told the media after the day’s play.

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“We’re positive. We’ve had a pretty good fightback [Monday] and anything can happen on this wicket. Things happen so quickly when the ball’s spinning and turning and as you saw [Monday] a few of them really jumped, so we’re confident that if we get on a bit of a roll [Tuesday] we can knock them over,” he said. Agar praised Bangladesh’s spin trio of Mehedi Hasan Miraz, Taijul Islam and Shakib al Hasan for their brilliant performance with the ball. “They bowled quite well to their credit, their spinners were really accurate, it was quite tough out there at times and you just have to wait for a bad ball and something you can capitalise on as a batsman,” he said. While Agar informed that the pitch is becoming more difficult for batsmen, Bangladesh batters played well against them in the late session of day two.

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Agar admitted their spin department has to bowl accurately to trouble the Bangladesh batsmen on Tuesday. “It’s definitely getting a bit harder. It’s going to get harder and harder to bat on. This is what spinners love, when the ball jumps and spins, especially off the good part of the wicket. This is what we really like,” he explained. “You have to remain patient though, they’re good players of spin, and they played it pretty well tonight so me, Gazza (Nathan Lyon) and Maxi (Glenn Maxwell) are going to have to be patient and really accurate [Tuesday] and hopefully we get our rewards,” he concluded.