We will strive to be more competitive

Since gaining independence from being East Pakistan and born as a new nation called Bangladesh, they have honed their cricket in no uncertain manner to become a front runner in the game that the people in the Indian sub-continent love so much.

The people in this land have a rich history in Cricket and when it was a part of Pakistan, Test cricket was hosted only in Dhaka, but, today it has spread to every nook and cranny of the land.

Bangladesh was accepted as an associated member of the ICC in 1976 and took part in the inaugural ICC trophy in 1979 and did well to reach the semi-finals of it in 1982 and 1990. Then in 1997 they won the ICC trophy and was accepted as a full member of the International Cricket Conference in 2001 becoming the 10th member of the full status fraternity. They played their Inaugural Test match against India in the same year.

Soon after the game against India it was Sri Lanka who afforded the new cricketing nation a chance of indulging in Test cricket and it being the full member who has given them the most number of Test matches in their 46 Test history – taking them on in eight Test matches.

However in their 46 Test span, the result gained by Bangladesh has not been very encouraging. Besides a single Test win against the other minnows in Test Cricket – Zimbabwe, Bangladesh have hardly been able to take the fight on to the opposition in spite of having scored over 400 runs in an inning on four occasions. . Mind you their highest score of 488 came against Zimbabwe and their second highest total has come against none other than Australia making 427 in April 2006.

This depicts that they do possess the talent, but, have to do a lot of homework about the longer version of the game and learn ways and means of improving their profile.

To learn more about how Bangladesh intends taking on the longer version of the game The Sunday Times met up with the Bangladesh Tour Operations Manager Ali Asif Khan and their young skipper Mohammed Ashraful in the very evening after they had crashed to another crushing defeat against Sri Lanka on Thursday.

Explaining about their domestic first class structure Ali Asif Khan said “At present we are striving to establish the four-day structure. Putting a lot of emphasis on first class cricket which we did not have before and now we believe that we have a strong first class structure. It needs a lot of improvement, but we are working on that.

“Besides that we are also nurturing our junior cricket – under 15, 17 and under 19 cricket in short the Board is working in so many ways to make our domestic cricket very strong so that we can compete at Test match level.

“We are trying to make our four day cricket tournament very competitive, what happened before was we had twelve or thirteen teams in our first class structure. Now we have eliminated that and now we have only six teams taking part in it. Besides that players who are taking part in this competition are selected by the national selectors and in that way you can eliminate manipulation. Now what we have done is that the selectors choose the six teams and we have a very strong competition. This change came about two years ago and in reality we will be able to see the results of this development only in another three to four years”.

Moving to skipper Ashraful we queried as a cricketer who got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka as a sixteen-year-old, how he has seen the movement of Test cricket in Bangladesh. Ashraful replied “During the last six years as a Test cricketer I have played against many countries and I have seen our side, improving. But, here till we took on India last month we had not played Test cricket for about fourteen months and the adjustment back to the longer duration of the game has been a bit difficult. The momentum that we had got going was lost. Now we are trying to catch up”.

Then we asked Ashraful after their crushing defeat in the just concluded Test match how they were looking to be competitive in the next two games. The young skipper answered “We are very confident that we would get very competitive in the coming two tests. In this game in the first innings we did not do well. The wicket had some moisture and we could not cope with that very well. However our batting on day three was very encouraging. We batted for ninety overs losing only five wickets and we are hoping to take that as a bar and take it for the balance of the series”.

When asked Ashraful about the bowling not being up to the expected Test level the reply was “We have a very good bowler in Mashrafe Bin Mortaza and Mohammed Rafiq is also a vastly experienced bowler. Abdur Razzak is also rated very highly in the shorter version of the game. However we failed to put enough runs on the board on the first innings. Eighty nine runs is not sufficient for any side to put any pressure on an opposition. I put this as the main reason for our bowling to look thin in that game.”

“There were lots of preparations for the World Cup and all our attention was diverted towards that endeavour. So coming from that back ground and transforming our attention of playing Test cricket for a young cricketing nation like us can be a bit difficult. But, I am sure that we could be more competitive in the coming series.” Asraful said in conclusion.

We will strive to be more competitive - Ashraful