National team pacer Shoriful Islam always carries a smile on his face. It was the case during the ongoing Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) 2024 too where he featured for Durdanto Dhaka.

The only difference with other times and now is the fact that smile faded away time and again in the tournament despite all his effort of the left-arm pace bowler that saw him leading the wicket taking chart when he played the last game in the ongoing BPL against Chattogram Challengers at the Zahur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium on Saturday night.

Dhaka suffered 11 successive losses in the competition after beating the defending champions Comilla Victorians in the BPL opener.

But on every single occasion, Shoriful gave his level best to help the team come out of the losing streak, but unfortunately could not get enough support from his team mates to get over the line and now the fans of the team can only take solace from the fact they had some individual brilliance.

Shoriful is the highest wicket-taker so far in the tournament with 22 scalps under his belt while two Durdanto batsmen are among the five leading scorers in the competition.

Australian Alex Ross came to play BPL for the first time and scored 352 runs in 11 matches with an average (39.11) and strike rate (134) while Naim Sheikh scored 310 runs with an average of 25.83 and strike rate of 119 runs.

Shoriful is currently the highest wicket taker in BPL as far as the Bangladeshi pace bowler is concerned but despite all these achievements he looked to be missing something and that is the joy of winning games.

“It would have been much better if we were not in the top five (performers’ list) but all of us came up with small contributions to help the team win. There is nothing more than playing as a team because instead of individual performance what is more important is team’s performance and that was something missing for us (Dhaka),” said Shoriful.

The left-arm pace bowler also looked to have become much wiser than before with all these defeats as he now seems to have understood the value of team game over individual brilliance.

“Cricket is a team game and individual performance hardly matters at least that we have all understood in the BPL because despite of doing well individually, we are still at the bottom,” he concluded, who will be eyeing to carry on the same form during the upcoming home series against Sri Lanka, scheduled to start after the BPL.