The world champions raced 4-0 up in the one-day series in the West Indies in May and June but skipper Ponting said the team let themselves down badly when they fell away to lose the last three games.

"That hurt a little bit," Ponting told reporters in Cairns on Friday.

"I was particularly disappointed with the way we played those last three games and that was one thing we addressed this morning in the team meeting.

"We made mistakes in those three games that you haven't seen this team make for a long time. We didn't respect the basics of the game and if you don't do that in one-day cricket it's going to come back and bite you every time.

"We dropped a lot of catches, we didn't have batting partnerships, there were a lot of misfields, those sort of things. Looking back we felt we'd let ourselves down big time."

The series starts with back-to-back games in Cairns in tropical north Queensland today (Saturday) and Sunday. The final match will be in Darwin on Wednesday.

The match will be shown live on BTV from 5.30 am

Bangladesh must have hoped that, after their two Test losses, they would face a decreased degree of pressure in the one-day series, but events this week have precluded that.

Once it was confirmed that off-spinner Sanwar Hossain was still eligible to play for Bangladesh in the ODIs, despite his bowling action having been reported as suspect, attention very naturally turned to whether the match umpires would be prepared to call him for throwing during the first match.

Australia has been one of the hotbeds of action against suspect bowlers in recent times, with the memorable calling of Sri Lankan spinner Muttiah Muralitharan generating considerable controversy in 1996. David Shepherd and Simon Taufel will be the men in the hot seats.

Bangladesh are not expected to greatly trouble the home side. Even the absence of one of their key performers, fast bowler Glenn McGrath, who returned home with an ankle injury, should not detract from the immensely lopsided odds.

West Australian Brad Williams has taken McGrath's place, and there is concern that all-rounder Andrew Symonds may not be able to play due to an attack of influenza.