There were still around five minutes left before tea. Almost every cricketer from both sides remained seated inside their respective dressing rooms. But one man was already standing near the boundary rope, seemingly desperate to get back onto the field. His name was Mushfiqur Rahim, a batter for whom the urge to bat never quite fades.
How could it, when a man who has woven batting into the fabric of his life was unbeaten on 90 at the time? The 15-minute tea interval between the two sessions must therefore have felt painfully long to him. Once play resumed, he needed only 23 deliveries to collect the remaining 10 runs.
When the wait finally ended with a boundary off Mohammad Abbas, Mushfiqur was overcome with emotion in celebration. Perhaps, even after registering his 14th Test century, the joy still felt as pure as it had for his very first.
The moment he realised the ball would race away to the boundary, he raised one hand aloft. Then, at the middle of the pitch, he flung away his bat. Mushfiqur lifted both arms in triumph before embracing his non-striker, Taijul Islam, while applause rang out from the dressing room behind him.
The previous evening had ended with Mominul Haque departing off the final ball of the day. That meant Mushfiqur resumed the morning alongside Najmul Hossain Shanto.
When they walked out to bat, the sky was still blanketed in clouds. Later the sun emerged, yet as the afternoon wore on, Najmul, Litton Das and Mehidy Hasan Miraz all fell in succession.
At one end, however, Mushfiqur remained — calm, composed and increasingly exasperating for the opposition. He weathered the difficult early phase of the morning with Najmul. Then came a 123-run partnership with Litton, compiled from 186 deliveries, taking Bangladesh’s lead beyond 300. After Litton’s dismissal, Mushfiqur carried the innings forward again in the company of Miraz.
Later, his unbroken stand with Taijul also crossed fifty, with every additional run pushing Pakistan team further and further out of the contest.
By surpassing Mominul’s tally of 13, Mushfiqur now holds the record for the most Test centuries by a Bangladeshi batter with 14. Across all three formats, only Tamim Iqbal stands ahead of him with two more hundreds.
Yet beyond the numbers, beyond the perpetual cycle of records being broken and rewritten, Mushfiqur now occupies a place even greater. In Test cricket, he has long been the backbone of Bangladesh’s batting. In Sylhet today, he proved it once again.