[WarWolf]

Muhammad Rafique, the legendary SLA, is probably the most famous spinner in Bangladeshi cricket. After he retirement, young spinners like Shakib Al Hasan, Abdur Razzaz, Mahmudullah Riad and Nayeem Islam occupied the vacuum space. A good number of young spinners are also waiting in the side line. Currently Bangladesh has one of the best spinning attack in the world.

But what about the pace attack? Is it good enogh for this level? Do we have sufficient numbers of good promising pacers waiting in the sideline? I am afraid that the answer will be a big NO. To me, the quality of the pace bowling department is deteroiting day by day rather than improving.

In the early days of our test cricket, we had very limited quality of pacers like Hasibul Hasan Shanto, Mohammad Sharif, Monjurul Islam, Mushfiqur Rahman. They tried their best to serve the nation not being much successful. Then we had seen the emergence of a true hearted fast bowler called Mashrafee Mortaza. But extra pressure on his young body forced this wonderful bowler stay away from the team for a couple of occassions due to injury. He is still in the team and leading the team formally as the official captain. But due to another injury he has to stay away from the team right now. To be frank, he couldn't reach anywhere he was expected to be simply because of the unprofessional way of handling him. He is merely a shadow of the promising fast bowler we have seen in him in his early days.

Then we had Talha Jubair, Tapash Baishya, Tareq Aziz, Nazmul Hossain. Interestingly none of them except Nazmul Hossain is anywhere near the national side. They are probably lost forever.

After that we have seen Shahadat Hossain, Syed Rasel, Farhad Reza and Rubel Hossain coming to the side. Everybody of them has been impressive in their very early days. But as time passes, all of them have started to lose their rhymthm. A pace bowler is expected to improve with time. But ours case is simply the opposite.

We have some good promising pace bowlers waiting to be regular in the national team. Mahbubul Alam, Dolar Mahmud are two of them. If we cannot handle them properly then there is a good chance that they will not be able to groom up as well as expected.

This raises a simple question, "Why this thing is happening over and over again?" Why we are unable to groom up these pacers? One simple answer may be "they are not good enough". But this is not 100% true. We don't know how to find good numbers of pacers and how to groom them up.

Since last one year our pace department looks to be getting weaker day by day. Bowling short and wide, juicy over pitch deliveries, lack of variations and lethal weapons like yorker, reverse swingers, good sharp bouncers making it difficult for our pace attack to take wickets. Our bowling coach seems to have no clue of these things.

We must not forget that we need our pace attack to perform regularly along with our spin departments to win matches. Otherwise we will never be able to get regular success against the top teams.