Little Mirpur

Cries of 'Mushfiq! Mushfiq!', 'Bangladesh! Bangladesh!' and of course 'Bhua!, Bhua!', the whiff of biriyani behind the grass banks... could this be anywhere other than Mirpur's Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium? Only the use of the word 'grass banks' would have clued you in to the fact that this was not any of Bangladesh's international venues. From the press box, the only reminder that this is a foreign land was the lack of big, concrete stands. But if you closed your eyes yesterday and let the other senses take over, it was Mirpur in early winter.

That the biggest crowd on Bangladesh's tour of South Africa will be in the ODI series was expected; that the overwhelming majority would be Bangladesh's supporters proved that the Bangladeshi cricket supporter is perhaps the most fanatically loyal in all of cricket.

According to Zia, a Bangladeshi shop owner in Kimberley, expatriate Bangladeshis number about 2,000 in Kimberley and surrounding areas, by a conservative estimate. By a conservative estimate, and going by the noise that greeted every Bangladesh boundary, all 2,000 of them were at the Diamond Oval yesterday. But the ground, which has a capacity of 11,000, was packed to capacity and at least 60 per cent of them were Bangladeshi.

Shafatur Rahman Onick, a cellphone shop owner in Johannesburg, made the six-hour car trip to Kimberley the previous day. "On Sundays, business is slow, so I thought why not go down to Kimberley," Shafatur said as everyone around him cheered wildly to celebrate another Mushfiqur boundary.

If a six-hour trip from Johannesburg was no matter, then a 100-minute drive from Bloemfontein was peanuts. Judging by the number of people who shouted out in Bangla 'see you in Kimberley' during Tigers' Bloemfontein stay, a majority of Bangladeshi voices may well have been from the city of the Orange Free State.

A young man in a Bangladesh t-shirt with the word Pranto printed on the back had gone, or come, even further. "I am from Botswana," the Bangladeshi student said, as if it was nothing. It was a four-hour drive, but crossing international borders seemed a small price to pay.

Having shouted themselves hoarse throughout the first half of the match, there was an eerie quiet during South Africa's innings. With a loss inevitable, the banks were half empty halfway through the chase. It doesn't get more Mirpur than that.