After following Bangladesh cricket for such a long time the only thing comes to my mind that the performance and skills in a Bangladeshi batsman actually is the lack of patience. It showed with the former players as well as the newbies. Patience is a non existence entity within the Bangladeshi players mindset. They have never been taught the art of patience, it was never in their curriculum, nor it was embedded within our domestic cricket structure. Simply put, a Bangladeshi player was never learned to be patience. It comes down to expectation, temperament, shot selection, wait for the bad balls, wait for the right passage of play, approach in their style of play, building an innings, work ethics, so on and on. As younger cricketers they knew right from the word go that a few good knock here and there against below par NCL bowlers would ensure them a Bangladeshi cap. Just one good NCL season and you might dream about your debut with the national team. Its as cheap as it gets. A good NCL season and they expect to be in the national team. They grow false confidence. They grow high expectation. We never let them wait for their call up and keep performing until they get called up. Even an experienced campaigner is bound to have few bad patches; even within the standards of NCL. Its not necessarily a bad thing. They learn from their mistakes. They get toughened up and learn how to not let themselves down when the going gets tough. They learn the art of backing themselves up with fine performances at the NCL level. But our selection panel and we as fans just can't wait. We want them to picked for national team right then and there. Our contribution factor is heavy, it is way too heavy. We contribute towards their downfall and we are first ones who would be heavily criticising them for their failures. We want their heads. The kid haven't yet learned to control his adrenaline rush, let alone control an innings. Not every 17 year old is Tendulkar and never will be. They would still score a few good knocks here and there but never will be consistent. Consistency comes from patience not from adrenaline rush or even batting skill for that matter.
Instead our cricket culture let them be in the international arena much sooner than they are ready for it. The magic phrase here is TALENT. All it takes is someone from our selection panel or some over-enthusiastic fans to see some TALENT with their "in-built TALENT-O-METER goggles" along with their very shallow cricket knowledge. If i leave cricket skills aside because they are already been labeled as talented; these young bunch hasn't learnt about temperament, rush of blood, controlling of expectation, controlling of an innings, wait for the bad balls, backing themselves when going gets tough, shot selection, wait for bad balls, being confident without being over-confident, the stage fright of pressure and the list can go on for ever. And we want them to be successful, we want them to be consistent. I want to ask any honest BC member, isn't that too much to ask for?
And all this is based on just one or at best two NCL season. Can anyone in this forum honestly tell me this, how hard it is to score a few good knock here and there against NCL bowlers on a very well known slow pitches. How hard it is to smash the NCL bowlers every now and then? As much as we want them to be world beaters we as a nation constantly failing to understand the fact that we must and i repeat myself we must let these young kids go through the ranks of patience before selecting them for the national side.
Patience is a filter. It filters the hard-workers, determined, strong-willed, confident, energetic, intelligent, team-players from the shaky, inconfident, lethargic, dumb, selfish and greedy ones. You would never find a shaky, inconfident, lethargic, dumb, selfish and greedy person shows patience. They want quick success, cheap fame, cheap talk with the potential low attitude, low confidence, ill work ethics, greed and so on and on. We, as a nation of mad cricket lovers failed to identify these problems and failed to embed patience in every phase of our cricket development. As a result we are in a situation where we cannot clearly claim we are a worthy test playing nation. This is not a blame game. This is a realisation.