So how is the Bangladesh Cricket Team exactly doing in international cricket? -It may sound like a sudden question... but probably it is not too early to try to make an initial assessment. Because, in my whole opinion, the current BD team has certainly reached their first level targets already, but they are yet to start looking at the second phase of improvements. I am not exactly pinpointing these phases on the basis of any ‘Technical’ Cricket theory, rather merely from observations and my own idea of the teams.
Bangladesh Team has almost finished their first year under the coaching of the well-renowned Dav Whatmore, and with decent confidence it can be said that our team has reached a certain level of credibility, discipline, a different fighting mindset and quite a few other obvious characters, which I want to mention as the
First level of success. Here are some positive things that we gained:
# Bowling discipline: Not that we got 4 or 5 world-class ‘fasties’ or ‘spinnies’ but this department works tightly and with high enthusiasm and we got quite a few promising youngstars waiting in queue. And the squad we have is often tottering the opponents!
# Fielding : Has already been praised by everyone. The team sometimes fields like real tigers!
# Team-Spirit : A very much appreciable team-discipline and team-spirit, accompanied by desperate urge to get victories which, can be termed as a highly-accelerating curve.
Now those were all the
Good news, but there are
Bad news also!
What about our Batting??
In reply to that question starts all the bad newses...
“We are still doing Horribly”
# The opening-pair crisis seems like becoming almost ever-lasting!
# The following top-order is only repeating its horrible mistakes over and over again!
# Each and every ‘potential’ specialist batsmen in our team seems to be completely unable to find themselves and their consistency!
# Unfortunately enough, the advantage of having a much much better late-order batting ability is not having any impression on the top-order’s confidence level !!
# The ‘Rising’ and ‘Struggling’ status of the team seems to affect the temperament of our batsmen so deeply and understanding between themselves is so very poor ! This only implies their extra-sensitivity towards ‘circumstances’.
This extraordinary dilemma is really provokes me to term this total situation as the
Second level of targets in which the core focus will be to improve the depth of our BATTING! Because IMWO,
at the end of the day, Cricket is a game of Batsmen !! The quality of the whole game depends so much on the standard of batting alone. In the list of the ‘All time Greats’ in world cricket we do find more ‘Great Batsmen’ then ‘Great Bowlers’. Even while the match, ‘Bangladesh Innings’ is the innings in which Bangladesh team is ‘Batting’ and not ‘Bowling’! (Certainly no different from any other team!)
I am surely not dumb enough to demand any success by the team ‘overnight’. Rather, I would like to say, after the initial status that we have gained in all other departments, its time we start ‘Organizing’ the Batting dept. immediately. This is a sophisticated goal and surely batting well is not only the most vital thing, it’s also the toughest!! Reaching satisfactory standards in Batting alone may take as much time as it took us to come to a level in all other parts of the game altogether. Lets hope our team-management & BCB takes steps to relieve all the ‘Tiger-supporters’ from the frustration of watching the team batting recklessly. Because at current level of the squad, BD team will only win a game in which the opposition BATS HORRIBLY!

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[Edited on 17-5-2004 by crickethorizon]