🏏Cricket World Cup 2023: Match #11: New Zealand vs Bangladesh 🏏 - Page 3

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Just over a week into the World Cup, and five-time World champions Australia are looking down the barrel with two successive defeats. We don't say that too often about the Aussies, do we? Their Antipodean neighbour, however, are absolutely flying high at the moment. A 9-wicket win, followed by a 99-run win. New Zealand couldn't have asked for a better start to their campaign, surely. A win today will take them to the top of the table and what's even more exciting is the return of their skipper, Kane Williamson. Their opponents, Bangladesh, are coming on the back of a 137-run loss against England and would hope for a spin-friendly surface to make the most of the conditions. Hello and welcome, this is game 11. Ball one in 60...

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Weather conditions: Expected to be hot and humid with temperature hovering around 32 degrees for the first half and it is expected to drop down to 28 later in the evening.

What to expect from the pitch? "For this game, the groundmen have prepared Pitch No. 4, which is a mix of black and red soil. It was watered and rolled many times over on the eve of the match, so don't expect the top surface to give away as soon as it did in the India-Australia game. This pitch could be harder and firmer, allowing batters to play their shots as well as the spinners to turn the ball," reckons our correspondent Pratyush Sinha.

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New Zealand is a formidable team, and we all know the result, but we are expecting to watch a good competition.

A good crowd is building up at Chepauk. There are a lot of green jerseys being spotted. Three of them have travelled all the way from Kolkata to watch Bangladesh play here. But expect a good support for New Zealand too, especially for the likes of Devon Conway and Mitchell Santner who play for the Chennai Super Kings

Kane Williamson

"For us as a team it's really just trying to keep focusing on our plans and what we set out to do and do our roles as best we can, sort of knowing that it could look a little bit different, to perhaps our first couple of games."

New Zealand skipper Kane Williamson says that quickly adapting to the changing Indian conditions will be the biggest challenge for every team in the ongoing ODI World Cup.

"You go from venue to venue, and they do vary a lot, and we have seen here that there's been that spin, and the pitch has varied perhaps as the games moved on as well, so throughout the day. But definitely, both teams have some good spin bowlers that no doubt will play a big part tomorrow," Willamson told reporters ahead of the match against Bangladesh.

"Not just here in India, but any country when you play, certainly world events where there are multiple games on surfaces, in quite quick succession that you do see such a variety of surfaces that you have to try and adapt to as quickly as possible. So, from where the tournament starts to perhaps midway and towards the end, it can all look quite different. It's very much trying to focus on adapting as quickly as possible and sort of parking previous performances, taking some of the good and getting nice and clear that it's about starting again and looking to apply ourselves with what we have that is in front of us. And for us, that's an important part of it."

Predictions for today?