Jan 9, 2012

The England Lions tour in Bangladesh is underway and the side started poorly with a 6-wicket defeat against Bangladesh A in Chittagong. 

Essex's Tymal Mills is part of the touring squad and he been sharing his experiences on his blog of the tour...

Essex fast bowler Tymal Mills is writing exclusively for All Out Cricket about his time away with the England Lions in Bangladesh. In his first blog, the 19-year-old paceman settles into life in Chittagong.

After a couple of weeks off, all of the coaches and staff met at Heathrow on the evening of New Year's Day ready for the long, arduous journey to Bangladesh. After three flights and a coach journey we arrived at our new home for the first part of the tour, the Peninsula Hotel in Chittagong. Here we will be playing a warm-up match followed by three ODIs against Bangladesh A.

The first full day's training was a light one, with just a few games to get us running around again and blow out any cobwebs that may have developed over the previous few weeks. We are based at the Zahur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium for all our matches and practice, which is where the national side play a lot so it has the best facilities possible.

We then had a few more practice days at the stadium and the lads were all into the swing of things pretty quickly with our batting, bowling and fielding all shaping up nicely leading up to the first practice match. We faced up against a strong 'Selected Bangladesh XI' on Friday but the lads performed very well to beat them comfortably by four wickets. Brooksy (Jack Brooks) and Briggsy (Danny Briggs) took three and four wickets respectively as we bowled them out for 186. JRoy (Jason Roy) and Rooty (Joe Root) then got us off to a good start getting 30s and everyone else chipped in as we knocked off their score without too much fuss.

There isn't a great amount to do here in the evenings so we spend most of the time trying to find ways of entertaining ourselves, which usually involves spending time in the Pizza Hut across the road – or in my case, trying to find someone who can beat me on FIFA! Alex Hales keeps trying and failing, much to his annoyance.

At the time of writing I'm just chilling with my roommate JRoy ahead of the first ODI in the morning. Hopefully we will build on the performance in the warm-up game.

 

Tymal's blog is courtesy of All Out cricket magazine - www.alloutcricket.com