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Old June 15, 2009, 02:50 AM
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yaseer yaseer is offline
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Join Date: August 29, 2004
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For that many years, we could not upgrade our club cricket tournament to first class cricket. In NCL, actually players does not feel pressure to perform as players have to motivate themselves to perform in NCL. Its a completely different scenario in Club level. Here lots of pressure comes from Officials and fans to perform. It's not close to the pressure of national team, but at least players get practice to perform under pressure situation. We need to upgrade the status of our club cricket to first class tournament and make it as important a tournament (if not more) as NCL.

My proposed model for club cricket is something like similar to Bangladesh Premiere League in Foot-ball. We should allow top 10 clubs of Dhaka Premiere League and 5 Champion clubs from 5 divisional leagues, and make a Bangladesh Premiere League with 15 clubs participating. By doing this we can have some real competitive cricket with interest/pressure from fans like we used to see in late 80's and early 90's. These will benefit us in many ways -
- It will ensure to have regular leagues in other divisional head-quarters and step forward for decentralizing cricket.
- Interest on Domestic cricket can come back as fans will be eager for their Abahani/Mohammedan
- BPL can be organized through out Bangladesh as there will be clubs from outside Dhaka.
- To make it more competitive, over time when more clubs will be involved, there can be relegation system introduced in BPL and BPL Division -1 , BPL Division -2 can be introduced.

I always think players from late 80's and early 90's generation, namely Lipu, Nannu, Bulbul, Akram, Athar, Saiful; they were not equal in quality of the current bunch, but on their time, they were more matured headed players. They had cool brain and used to perform under pressure. It had lot to do with playing some serious pressure cooker Abahani-Mohammedan matches in-front of 50,000 people. The real rise of Bangladesh cricket began on that time too when we started to have jam-packed stadium in Dhaka Premiere League.

I know we cannot get back those same intensity in domestic cricket for obvious reasons. But still there are many scopes to make it more competitive than what it is at the moment. There is no way out other than strengthening the club cricket if we really want competitive domestic structure.
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