While England versus Bangladesh has never conveyed a great deal of prestige, this current tour, after Bangladesh have shown some fairly recent improvement, is the ultimate snub. The Tests have been relegated to unofficial warm-ups for England's India tour. It's probably better than the sides not meeting at all, but the Bangladesh team might find some reserves of determination at their diminished status, much as did the 'mediocre' West Indies against England a year ago. Even if the current hosts have historically been, at best, tolerated, this time their underdog rank has been declared by the visitors for all to see.
Of course, England are not alone. The series against Australia was unfortunately cancelled, but Bangladesh haven't played a Test for fourteen months, since a washout in Mirpur against South Africa, after they threatened to beat the Proteas in Chittagong. History tells us to be wary of the Bangladesh weather.
FIVE MEMORABLE PERFORMANCES. Richard Johnson: 5-49 & 4-44, Chittagong, November 2003.
If at times the games held in the UK have seemed uncompetitive, the two Asian series have taken some winning by England, and the home side have shown resistance. In the first Test between the countries at Dhaka, Bangladesh took wickets well enough, but struggled to post a total. England gave debuts to Gareth Batty and Rikki Clarke (Flintoff was injured) in the first Test. The series came just before the great year of 2004, but the team was still a little transitional: Chris Read came back into the eleven after Alec Stewart's retirement; Hussain and Butcher were coming to the end of their time in the national side; and the legendary bowling attack was not quite settled.
In the second Test, Martin Saggers made his debut for Steve Harmison, and Richard Johnson replaced Batty in a four man pace attack selected for an underprepared pitch. Johnson had been a late call up for the injured James Anderson. It was a bowlers pitch so credit to Trescothick, Vaughan, Clarke, Thorpe and Hussain for their fifties (the difficulty is suggested by Hussain claiming to the press that this was his toughest Test innings...). But it's Johnson's performance that stays in my memory, taking nine wickets in the match in the middle of his three Tests which yielded him 16 wickets at 17.2. For a while it seemed he might emerge as the fourth member of the England pace attack. But his recurrent back injury ended that, even if Simon Jones hadn't returned from his own injury.
At Chittagong, England won by 329 runs. They lost by a single defeat to Murali in Galle later in the winter, one of only a pair of series defeat between the Ashes losses of 2002-3 and 2006-7. It was the best time to be an England follower I can remember, and their debut series in Bangladesh gained interest from that developing narrative, an episode in the creation myth of Duncan Fletcher's gathering great England team.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/64053.html
I always say that everybody's right.