|
Originally Posted by Rinathq
Selection has always been a major debate in Bangladesh Cricket. For some reason, almost 100% of the time the think tank, the media, the fans and the actual selection committee cannot agree on a certain squad. I know I have been a big critique of our selection committee over the past. I have always thought our selectors are simply incompetent in differentiating different formats and operate from a special place in la la land when it comes to balancing prospect and experience. However, the recent selection fiasco starting from the West Indies series has given me the impression that our selectors are not incompetent but blatantly corrupt and dangerously arrogant.
As I mentioned, it started to get worse from the West Indies series with a few questionable moves. Not much could’ve said at that time since the test series was such a disaster and those minor changes may have not impacted the result. However, fast forwarding to the Asia Cup, it just got worse where they for whatever reason picked Mominul Haque who has struggled in the shorter format for as long as memory serves and picked an uncapped Nazmul Hossain Shanto for a condition even our seniors are not used to playing in. We know what happened after that. The entire tour was a top order disaster only to be rescued by Mushy, Imrul and Liton in separate games. They also picked Ariful and despite our batting failures throughout the tournament he did not get a chance to play a single game. Towards the end of the Asia cup they flew in Imrul Kayes and Soumya Sarkar straight from NCL which surprisingly our skipper had no knowledge about. Why bother consulting the skipper anyways right?
Following a successful Asia Cup, most people obviously forgot about how terribly our top order was exposed thanks to the selectors stupidity more than anything. With multiple injuries, it was expected that the selectors would be forced to make some proper changes to the lineup against Zimbabwe which is essentially a trial and error series at this point. Even though they made the changes but once again, it was ridiculous. They picked an uncapped Fazle Rabbi who despite having a decent A tour, has a track record of being a very average player. The selectors made a complete mockery by calling a “complete package” just because he was capable of rolling his arm for a few overs in domestic games. From the given lineup, once again Ariful and Abu Hider was ignored for second series in a row. Shanto who had a miserable tournament at no fault of his, was benched for the first two ODIs where really should’ve played every game in the tour. Imrul who was brought in as a middle order batsman in Asia Cup despite the top order struggle is now slotted back to open the innings. If I were Imrul, I would wake up every day to wonder what my batting position will be in the next game. What was even more surprising was the drop of Soumya Sarker who got picked in the middle of Asia Cup and again discarded for the ODI series. But wait! Soumya having scored a 100 in an academy ground and a few 50s in NCL which is a different format all together, got picked AGAIN in the middle of the series for the last ODI. Unsurprisingly enough, our skipper was once again unaware of this out of nowhere inclusion. This must be an added migraine to Mashrafe who is having trouble giving chances to the guys already in the team and all of them deserving game time.
Finally, the recent selections for the practice game and the test series is just beyond anyone’s understanding. Picking Ariful, Mithun, Shafiul, Khaled, Nazmul which is essentially 33% of the squad undeserving of the opportunity when there are players like Tushar Imran, Al Amin Hossain, Nurul Hasan that are far better candidates based on their past performance in the team or form in the domestics. The test team which has been struggling for last 18 years was begging for experience and there is simply no one better then Tushar Imran who has been scoring runs for fun for the past 2 years consistently. But he was ignored because apparently our domestic statistics doesn’t mean jack s**t in internationals. But again someone like Khaled Ahmed was picked because of the same jack s**t league performance. Contradictory much? What’s even more pathetic is that almost none of the players from the practice match squad that the selectors announced just a day before are not in the actual squad. You would think they would wait till the end of that practice to see how some of those fringe players doing. But picking squad is just a game for these guys at this point.
I have been calling all of these mistakes pure incompetence but I don’t think so anymore. Every time a reporter asks our chief selector Minhazul Abedin Nannu about a certain questionable selection, he has a templated response ready and it sounds like this: “We are going through a process” and then when asked about discarding seniors, he has another template, “Look, if someone performs in domestic it does not necessarily mean they will perform in internationals” Well Mr. Genius, if you knew so well how come after all these years you have failed to have some kind of permanence into any of our squads? If your beer pong strategy of picking players worked, we wouldn’t need to debut a new player every single series.
Our selectors are destroying out young talents and wasting our experienced veterans and one would think it’s an honest mistake but at this point it has gotten to a point of arrogance. Our selectors are not held accountable for any of the failures and as a result, they have been having a free reign on who they pick and choose. They pick uncapped guys from their own affiliated cricket clubs (Mohor Sheikh), they rotate around players without any consideration to their specialty, suitable format and then come up with some bulls**t excuse in the end. These selectors wouldn’t last one series for any other cricket board but in BCB, I guess money is the only thing that really talks.
Shame on these corrupt, arrogant individuals that were actually representing our country at one point. Singlehandedly destroying our talent and relying on our core players to bail them out every time.
|