Mirpur brings alive the Cup
Feb. 19: Over the last week, he had stayed away from Sher-e-Bangla Stadium for fear of being mobbed. But at 2 am on Saturday morning, just hours before Bangladesh’s opening match against India, curiosity got the better of him.
So with an unwilling wife and sleepy kids in tow, former Bangladesh captain Habibul Bashar left home in the hope that he could show his family first-hand the venue that has been spruced up for the World Cup at the cost of a few million dollars.
He never got there. “I was hoping the streets would be empty by the time I reached. They weren’t – there were close to 30,000 outside the ground singing and dancing. The atmosphere was fantastic. It felt like we had already beaten India,” he told this newspaper on Saturday.
“I just caught a glimpse of the Sher-e-Bangla — it was lit up like a Christmas tree.”
Bashar turned back a kilometre away from the stadium, and so missed out on the party. Outside the stadium fully decked with decorative bulbs, the buzz of thousands of vuvezelas swelled in the night as the crowd roared and waved flags on the streets and elsewhere in the city. The numbers swelled with every minute and Dhaka as its suburb Mirpur partied till 5 in the morning.
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