Whatmore's comment

[mahbubH]

I am surprised to see Whatmore is still talking about positive sides of Bangladesh Cricket!! Is not it hard to talk this way after watching such a memorable perfromance from our stars?

Link Here

[chinaman]

Whatmore is aware the progress of Bangladesh in recent times has not gone unnoticed in world cricket but his team was still not able to cross the finish line.

"If my team has not done well it is the same with every team in the sub-continent, lack of self-belief.

"The more you are comfortable in different surfaces you are required to play, the better you get in your cricket. The issue is how much you get to play on these surfaces to become good."

"We have not still beaten a team above us. May be we need to beat two or three to start believing in ourself," Whatmore said.

He also felt that Bangladesh had everything going for them to become a major cricket-playing nation and it was up to the cricket superpowers to do as much as they could to help them grow.

"I think the facilities are on right track now. There are rollers, covers and grounds after the under-19 World Cup (held last year). We have the potential and real big sponsors. There is a huge interest and everyone wants to play cricket for Bangladesh.

"Cricket is much more visible now and it is followed in lot more ways. World cricket needs a very vibrant and strong Bangladesh and other potential countries.

"We need positive assistance rather than negative comments."

Whatmore, however, refused to single out any of Bangladesh as a future star and felt the top priority for his team was to translate potential into victory.

"I do not believe in individualising players. We need to keep great guard about it. The situation we are in the moment is that we are in the process of creating the stars. India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka already have superstars and we are in the process of creating them.

"I believe what we are doing is right but it has to translate into victory."

[Ahmed_B]

Infact he is using his own high degree of credibility within the cricketworld to justify the path of progress of the BD team!!

one may say he is doing it to protect his own reputation... but rather i would say... he is being almost like a father to the team!

"We need positive assistance rather than negative comments."
-this one comment of him is enough to reply thousands of nay-sayers against us!

I just hope the team also starts realising their responsibilities and set their nerves on steel!



[Edited on 21-7-2004 by crickethorizon]

[TigerFan]

am surprised to see Whatmore is still talking about positive sides of Bangladesh Cricket!! Is not it hard to talk this way after watching such a memorable perfromance from our stars?

I see nothing wrong with whatmore's comment. I think he is politically right. It shows how much high is his standard.

[Tiger]

I suggest everyone of us, including the bangladeshi cricket team, read "You Can Win" by Shiv Khera. It's got to be one of the best self-improvement book ever written.

[Imtiaz]

Publicly, Whatmore must stand by the players. Within the dressing room he must discuss collective faults and also praise collectively and individually, where appropriate, and on a one-to-one basis , he should dissect weaknesses etc.

My overwhelming feeling is one of morale deflation. Unlike many of you, I was not even thinking of a win. I just want a damn good fight - to compete. I am not getting it. And it is not Whatmore's fault. One can cast some tactical blame on him from game to game but ultimately the buck must stop with the players.

[sageX]

We donot have worldclass players in our team. Ash, Bashar, Rafiq are talked about in the world community as talant. These talant has not been converted to star yet. Rest of the players accept pilot are not upto the par. This is the truth. We donot have the star. It will take time to filter out such talent who can establish themselves as star in international cricket.

Dav is trying to establish the required parameters to do just that. BD fan and international community need to give BD team time and support.

[Ahmed_B]

Star = Talents + Exposure + Confidence + Perform!

we are only in the process... its not yet time to discuss whether we hav starts or not!
I'm sure, many of our players hav the potentiality to become stars thru the process.

all us fans shud hav a patience of say..10 years or so to hav a highest level competetive team and star performers as well.

[BushidoTiger]

But I'm yet to realize this 'progress' thing that DW and the whole BD cricket management (including the captain) are talking about.

Yes, DW has to defend publicly about this supposed progress, but I really hope that this kind of 'lets-give-everything-a-pos.-spin' speak doesn't take the batsmen into some sort of self delusional state, where they think they are not that bad.

Barring first test against WI, I'm yet to see this so called improvement. DW keeps talking about their lack of exp and mental toughness (lack thereof) etc, as convenient excuses for consistent dismal performances.

What do you call when a supposedly 'world class' WK, reliable veteran, who just got a century against WI, took off for a run after ball went straight to the fielder causing the most crucial player of the game to be ran out??

Where's the maturity in that?

What makes a batsman poke at a ball that was swinging wildly off stump and give practice catches to the fielders?

What kind of a leader gets caught with a delivery as if a deer caught in headlights, without any answer?

I agree with previous post which said we weren’t necessarily expecting a win rather hoping to see a good fight.

Along with the fans like myself, the BD cricket team are in self delusional state...when we do good, we start to shower the players with out-of-the world adjectives (read world-class bowler), out-of-whack rewards inconsistent with performance etc. (yes I do believe in pos. re-enforcement with balanced work/reward ratio).

The cricketers probably started to believe that they are better than what the stats might suggest. As a result they don't really try to undo their mistakes.

There is absolutely NO excuse for repeating the same mistakes over and over. I really get tired of hearing that 'lack of infrastructure', experience etc.

Again, no one's expecting them to win everything, but for God's sake when you enter the field, show up to play once. Show the heart, the Bengalee pride once. Go down. Get beaten, Fine…but go down fighting..!!

I don't think that is too much to ask. That is the ONLY thing most fans want at this point. Show some pride.

Just look at Hong Kong for example, a team mostly consists of expats, lost both to BD & Pak..but nobody can blame them for lacking heart or pride.
For some reason, this BD team collectively reminds me of a school kid in his early teen. This kid was doing badly in his math tests. In every exam, he'd consistently not make even 33% required to pass. The parents, the uncle who also doubled as a private tutor knew this kid had what is takes to understand math. At home, he seemed to understand the 'complicated' complex interest rate, the 'ratio' problems of the dishonest milkman mixing water with milk to increase profit etc.
Yet end of each terminal exam, the kid had to be coerced, threatened-for-life to have him show his graded exams to the parents.
The kid, on the other hand, despite all the yelling, desperate pedagogy around him would sink into a world of his own.
Everything said, would just enter in one 'kaan' and get out thru the other.

It wasn't till another private tutor assured the kid that his math score didn't matter and was able to have him open up and confess that he dreaded sitting in math tests and too eager to ‘finish’ the test.
“'I only want to finish as quickly as possible before everyone else”, informed the kid of his math tests experience.
Realizing that the kid had his focus/intention sat in the wrong place, the tutor told him that he didn't even have to attempt all ten questions, let alone finishing them during the exam.
“You just have to pick one that you feel comfortable and take all the time you want to finish that and do that one right and go on to the next one only time permitted”, assured the new tutor.
Unbeknownst to the kid, the tutor asked the class teacher not to accept his exam paper before the last bell rung.

The kid took that simple advice to heart, next time around he was able to concentrate only one thing at a time, forced to stay in his seat and really read and understand the problems.
Needless to say the result was a dramatic turnaround. He actually started to believe that he could do math and thanks to his improved results he started to enjoy math.

That forced focus/concentration would pay kudos for this kid for years to come. For this lack of math-phobia would help him managed to survive (albeit barely) extremely math-centric engineering education. Though never was a math whiz, even in his utter defeat, he never ran away from the math monster.

Although BD team hears all the clutters around them, I don't think any of it is being registered in the right lobes in their brains.
Once in the crease, they're going back to their old comfort zone and letting old habits run them.

This team, in my opinion, unfortunately, lacks the maturity to overcome these bad habits on their own recognition.
They have been given a lot of time to rectify their nagging mistakes.
It’s about time the honeymoon should be over and they ought to be subjected to some sort of tough regimental routines/directives.

Each batsman should be allocated a 'quota' of over/time/runs that they must survive/score based on their batting orders. If they fail, consequences should be exemplary and be served as deterrent.

Truly, it is sad that at this stage of our test playing status, we have to think of enforcing regiments suited for misbehaving juveniles.

Sometimes, I suppose it is necessary to 'beat pride into someone' for them to recognize what pride is.

Till then we remain painfully optimistic

[Bangla Mostan]

Whatmore is a critic, which is crucial for the development of our cricket.

Gaining positives out matches still is part of Whatmore’s strategy; he can use it to help raise morale’s of the players to a higher level. A lot of the cricket is psychological and Whatmore is clearly a specialist in that department, which makes him to be a pivotal asset to ongoing development of Bangladeshi cricket.

Whatmore has done an exceptional job in trying to lift the morales of the players. It was his initial task when he took over the job to improve individual performances. This involved making them mentally and physically stronger. One cannot stop at a stage and then more on to another objective. We still have to improve individually and that is a long process. Whatmore’s analysis of other teams are only beneficial to our players, because it shows the level of competitiveness our players have to reach, thus setting individual targets. This is a process in overcoming the mental block that most of our players still seem to have.

We do have potential as Whatmore clearly pointed out, but what we really need to do is gel as a team and that is individual efforts combining together. Factors like having consistency in the LINE-UP and ORDER as well as same players must take some time and cannot be based on several matches. These things take time, and what we are witnessing is a transition of our players morale improving now, a year on since Dav Whatmore took this job and slowly we will see them gelling into a fine team. We have crossed the halfway point now and we are moving up.

Shifting Ashraful up in the batting order, may seem like a failed experiment currently but this is definitely one to observe, because it is only consistently playing in that batting order, that will help transform Ashraful from his current state to a class-act. Although Cricket and football are two totally different sports, risk is necessary in both of them. I say this because a football superstar may not have been if he was not part of an experiment.

Thierry Henry, for those who do not know him is an exceptional world-class football player now, but he may not have been. In his early years in football he started off as a winger. He had soo much talent and potential, he could not express it by playing in that position. It was only when he was shifted to becoming a striker that he was able to convert this potential into personal triumph. Obviously at first it was difficult as he had to adjust, but it was consistency in playing in that position that he was able to succeed to where he is now.

The same goes for Ashraful, Whatmore sees his potential and he is still young, why not take the risk to experiment in a new role. Of course he would have a hard time adjusting to new level of pressure, but that only lasts for a short while. Constantly playing in that order would enable Ashraful to personally experiment with his skills and adjust to such pressures.

‘It is a lengthy process, where being patient is the key. With more time it will eventually pay-off.’

[chinaman]

Dear BushidoTiger and Bangla Mostan

Thank you guys for great posts. Could you be interested in rewriting them to publish as front page articles? You may u2u the revised articles to me or any moderator. Keep up the good works. Cheers.

[Rho]

whatmore is great. he's turned BD cricketers into fighters. There lies my problem. Whatmore should not have had to do this himself, Bangladeshi players should've fought like this from the beginning. That they have no friggin pride is the main problem. Well anyways now they're fighting. But now so far they're showing a shocking lack of talent!!! The so called batting talents like Sumon, Saleh are so amazingly inconsistent that they might as well not be talented! Even if a retarded batsman is playing out there he'll do something exciting 1 out of 20 times. Sumon's LOI average is still below 20 and for the rest noone's averaging more than 25 I think. One word sums it up Pathetic.

I only look for Mashrafe's return, the one I find to be the only bright spot in Bangladesh' test history.

[rafiq]

Have you considered starting a Pessimist's Support Group in a private area of this message board? Just a thought...

[sageX]

Indian fans plz enjoy good Indian cricket and leave bangladesh cricket worry to us and coach. Indian negetive comments is everywhere. It is only Indians who are doing unsubstantial criticism. Cricinfo and cricketnext is down right insulting. This kind of negetive comments are not good for moral of a new team. If you guys want BD to do well plz stop undermining the spirit of BD team.

Plz enjoy Indian good cricket and show us some civility and leave us alone.

[chinaman]

Al Musabbir Sadi from Colombo

After a comprehensive defeat to India, Bangladesh coach Dav What-more said he was now more certain of the XI to field in the remaining matches and was not prepared to throw in the towel just as yet.

"To play in the final you need to win two games. India are ranked first, we are fourth. If we had to have a look at the other players planning for a line-up for Friday's match (against Sri Lanka), this was the game to do so. That's why we rested Tapash and the others.

Whatmore thought pressure played a part in the jittery performance of the Tigers. "It was a pressure game for us. The boys were on the lookout for runs. But as you know that one wrong decision and any batsman could be out. Unfortunately, some of the decisions haven't been correct ones today," said Whatmore.

The coach was pleased with the way young left-arm spinner Abdur Razzak bowled for the third game running, especially after being asked to bowl with the new ball.

"One of the few positive things out of this match was that Razzak did very well attacking with the new ball." Razzak gave away just 40 runs from ten overs bowling during the field restrictions.

Whatmore was once again left frustrated by the batsmen. "When batsmen get starts, you would like them to go on. Our problem has been all along that, once the boys get starts, they can't seem to go on. That's a recipe for disaster."

He praised Harbhajan Singh and Sachin Tendulkar who were the standout performers for India. "Harbhajan bowled pretty well. He came back after being hit for a six in the first over. Sachin batted really well. He looked like he was determined to get into the runs having missed out in the first couple of matches."

Tigers skipper Habibul Bashar was understandably bitter. "Nothing went our way as we failed to apply ourselves again. We could have won a bonus point but missed out on that too," said Bashar who disagreed with the opinion that he was taking a risk by opening the batting.

"It was not a gamble. We have tried Manjarul in as an opener in the past but as I have been playing against the new ball regularly, I thought it was a better option for me to open."

Like his coach, the skipper too picked out Razzak for special mention. "Razzak clicked with the new ball. They (India) are used to score more runs when the ball is new. That's why we took the decision last night to start with him. Had we scored 220-230, we would have had a chance to compete. Our total was not defendable," Bashar said.

DailyStar >>

[mzia]

Forget about win, forget about opponent, play as per your ability and criticize your mistake, hope that will help to develop.