I. Wise soothsayers and their Book of Zohar*.
Many members here in BC - and for good enough reasons I might add - tend to form solid as opposed to merely speculative opinions about Bangladeshi players based on statistics alone. Consequently, the importance of VISUAL CONFIRMATION tends to fall by the wayside and even become somewhat banal under the traditional heat of our passion for the sport. While all of the fair-minded individuals in this group would only benefit themselves and us in the process by adding clear visual evidence to their often very good to excellent analysis, to others such benefits would only be twisted in order to fit into an Orwellian view of things.
The elite amongst that “my-way-or-the-highway” group of self-styled Big Brother wannabes, never shy to bypass the indignity in speaking for others, use and misuse all the doublespeak and statistics at their disposal, and retrieve faded memories from their time of attending club cricket here in Dhaka. Memories miraculously rendered perfect and hot-air brushed in Technicolor thanks to the twin blessings of nostalgia and ego, also serve to mislead, coerce, and finally convince us as they have managed to convince their own deluded minds. Before long, we too believe in our “enviable” cricketing infrastructure, “near perfect” selections for the Sri Lanka tour earlier this year, the inability of Zunaed Siddique to become a great fielder based on stale news, the “miraculous fortune” of certain players irrespective of superlative domestic performances which may actually warrant selection into a national side, and my personal favorite, Farhad Reza’s ability to bowl at 135 to 140 KMPH as we gleefully revisit our childhood faith in the Tooth Fairy, again mesmerized by the wisdom trickling down from the wise men above.
Who knows, maybe the interestingly named
Marshall Ayub*, not quite good enough to feature well in domestic First Class cricket, is indeed the next Shane Warne? Or Iftekhar Nayeem Ahmed, not good enough to be in the U-19 squad bound for Pakistan, is the next Brian Charles Lara? After all only GOD and His rightfully guided cricketing gods and intermediaries, or so they believe, know what will happen in the future, just as they know what cannot happen even when it does.
Fair enough I suppose, until of course they have the chance of actually SEEING the player in action with the rest of the flock, scapegoat someone else – often a popular and therefore a particularly convenient target to spew their venom at - and promptly start looking for other numbers from different players still playing cricket in the depraved corners of their alleged minds. The cycle never ends because the Nile is a river in Egypt, and conviction is nothing other than vanity to those who think of themselves as rightfully superior to us mere mortals, irrespective of the polite expression worn by the mask, or however soft their garment of unrighteousness may be. We were after all, born only yesterday and do not yet have the eyes to see through anything. They find perverse pleasure in the humiliation of others, calling us hypocrites when we call them on their malice, strangely unaware of the fact that hypocrites always expose more about themselves when accusing others. This is NOT their story.
II. Reality versus expectation, in general.
Luckily for us plebeians, perhaps that sort of speculative and hit-or-miss ‘selectionisms’ - almost psychic in their wishful thinking and deeply disturbing in their know-it-all air, always heavy with the weight of a plethora of cricketing delusions - are a thing of the past where it counts most, the Bangladesh Cricket Board’s Selection Committee. My fingers, however, remain still crossed as I continue to remain cautiously optimistic about its new direction forward.
With the much-desired smooth transition from domestic to international cricket still several years of steady and sustainable reformatting and improvement away, we are somehow still exasperated in seeing our players not perform as expected. Because of the improving but still below par domestic First Class and List A cricket not adequately preparing our young players for the highest level of International Cricket, we have no other choice but to assess real talent and allow that to be harnessed and applied on the job as long as the players have youth and the demonstrable ability to learn from past mistakes. In order to appreciate this hard truth better, we need only look at 1) the recent International, First Class and List A stats of Mohammad Ashraful Matin, possibly our top batsman, and Mashrafe Bin Mortaza, possibly our best bowler; 2) compare those stats to their career averages in order to at least statistically gauge noticeable improvements if any as they move forward to reaching their respective peak ranges still years away; and then 3) compare your extrapolations to top International batsmen and bowlers to have a clear idea of where our players actually are at the highest level.
Once we do all that, it becomes clear that the conventional wisdom, which easily applicable to older cricket cultures, does not necessarily apply to us at this juncture. We must therefore continue to draft genuine young prospects into the senior side, hopefully this time through a reasonable talent assessment process which obviously includes but is not exclusive to DULY CONTEXTUALIZED statistics, rather than the traditionally arbitrary ways based only on subjective perception. We fans must do whatever we can to ensure that they learn on the job despite some of the inevitable failures, and see things a bit more clearly as they are, rather than the way we’d like them to be. As responsible fans, we must demand from BCB - a PUBLIC agency financed largely by the Bangladeshi taxpayers - a systematic approach to talent assessment, selection and development of our First Class and List A cricketers. Then we must learn to bite the bullet when necessary while remaining as good-willed and fair-minded as we can. The alternative is nothing but aggravation with all of its adverse consequences at multiple levels. This is NOT fantasy cricket, and therefore it may be better for us fans to get a little perspective and develop a proper bit of patience.
High expectations are good as long as they are realistic, because if they are not, they’ll only lead to the sort of exasperation that serves no one. The late KMI Rana and Syed Rasel are rare exceptions of technically limited players who actually showed improvement at highest levels. Rana was unfairly scapegoated and dropped before he had the chance to come back into the side. The immensely talented Alok Kapali, on the other hand, has yet to prove himself at the highest level despite a promising start to his international career as demonstrated by his first 29 ODI matches, and exceptional performances in the NCL.
Some players like Javed Omar Belim and Rajin Saleh, and now Mahmudullah Riyad tend to stay where they are on the fringes of stop-gap measures, while others like Habibul Bashar, never really interested in overcoming all too familiar technical deficiencies and compulsions, get worse with age. While a veteran such as Khaled Mashud Pilot, I’m just talking about his batting here, can successfully use domestic cricket to try and reinvigorate his career, most other players, often years younger than the former national Skipper, just expose their limitations and subsequent inadequacies at the highest level before failing to pan out. Names like Tushar Imran, Ehsanul Haq, Mohammad Al Shahriar Rokon, Hannan Sarkar, Sanuar Hossain, Mushfique Babu, Monjural Islam Monju, Alamgir Kabir, the post-injury Mohammad Sharif and Farhad Reza leap to mind whenever I think of the phrase “not panning-out”, whether they were treated fairly or not.
Farhad Reza, it must be said, still has youth on his side, and can improve as a lower order batsman yet for the shorter versions of the sport. A clean and heavy hitter of the ball, he needs to find ways of staying focused on the hand he is dealt, a need he also shares with more talented batsmen in the National team. His improvement as a fielder over the last year, especially at Cover, has been nothing less than spectacular, and leaves me in no doubt that he has the capacity to learn quickly. I remain unconvinced about his abilities as either an effective strike or a containment bowler against top sides.
Now to Mohammad Nazimuddin.
III. Reality versus expectation, Mohammad Nazimuddin.
We start forming ideas about a player whose stats look pretty darn good in comparison to others, start rooting for him, and then find ourselves in the precarious position where instead of relishing the answers we were so eagerly anticipating through the expected performance of our new hero, we can think of only one question, an embarrassing question we can only ask ourselves: “What the F was I thinking?” I fear Mohammad Nazimuddin is one such player.
His performances in the T20WC preparatory tournament in Kenya, especially his stellar performance against the eventual World runners-up Pakistan and its formidable fast bowling attack, were not actually SEEN by anyone other than those in the stands in Nairobi. Naturally, after coming deliciously close to an always rare T20 hundred against our former masters, he was quickly catapulted to the often-ephemeral position of an overnight sensation of Bangladeshi cricket, and possibly the next big thing it has to offer to the world in the not too distant future. A nation of passionate cricket fans in the hundreds of millions, we hate loosing and therefore tend to be understandably impatient with the rate of our progress at the highest level of international cricket. We are always looking for a savior or two, and desperately want, almost like hormonally driven teenagers, the ‘input’ to meet the ‘expectation’. Not surprisingly, most of us believed that the newest marauder from the eastern shores of the Bay was going to be an answer to our prayers, without actually seeing how he managed to get those runs against the world-class pacers from Pakistan. We all imagined him to be another Aftab Ahmed who could possibly stay on the wicket longer and thereby benefiting his team, our team, the way it should be benefited by a top order batsman.
Then the real T20WC was on TV, we saw him bat and I dare say, DID NOT like what we saw. Our high expectations were not met and we found ourselves in that all too familiar corner of Room 00 in the basement of Heartbreak Hotel, Bangladesh. If was not just the fact that he couldn’t score runs, but also the awkward and technically unsound manner in which he was trying to stay on the wicket in order to score those much anticipated runs which never came from his bat. He quickly became another “zero from hero” as the tournament ended horribly for all of our top order batsmen except Aftab Ahmed in general, the classy Zunaed Siddique previously spelled with a J, and skipper Mohammad Ashraful Matin with his magnificent and match-winning knock against the West Indies.
Then the boys were back home to show us what they’ve learned from that experience as the new and improved NCL - the ONLY first class and List A tournament in the country based on selection - provided the opportunity for them to do so. Mohammad Nazimuddin, not surprisingly, has continued to score runs in the league and stay amongst the top 5 scorers as he has done in previous seasons, but failed to make a good impression in this fan’s mind with his unsound methods just like last year. Familiar apprehensions from last season’s NCL continue to mitigate his achievements in the NCL, and create serious doubts in my mind as to his readiness for the highest level of international cricket.
After watching him bat closely during the course of Chittagong’s FC and List A matches against the no frills mediocrity of Dhaka’s bowling attack without Shahadat Hossain Rajib out sick and in recovery, those doubts have become more deeply rooted than ever.
His skittish yet weirdly lazy footwork especially inside the crease makes him an ideal LBW candidate against any decent seamer in the world. Imagine a combination of Javed Omar and Tushar Imran facing the likes of Shane Bond or Daryl Tuffey, and maybe you can empathize with my fears. He looks comically lost dealing with anything above the waist delivered with any kind of pace. Also not at all a clean hitter of the ball, he is slow to pick up the pitch and line of deliveries early, and looked in obvious discomfort facing the dubious might of Sharif, Robin, Niaz and Rubel. He struggled to decipher and read the painfully gentle flight, loop and pace variations he faced from no frills, limited, but tenacious slow bowlers like Rubel, and was totally out-classed facing the quality of a resurgent Mohammad Rafiq, in fact the only quality bowling he faced during his trip to Dhaka. During his recent most 5 days of cricket, he and his comfort levels never looked liked anything other than a live, hazy video-stream buffering way too often. Vettori and Patel are more than likely to turn his batting into a low at resolution thumbnail which becomes even lower in resolution once you click to enlarge, if he manages to survive the Kiwi seamers first.
I think until he improves technically, meaning improves his footwork both in and outside the crease, consistently closes the gap between his bat and pad, learns to play cleanly with a straighter bat with his head where it should be, and does whatever he needs to do to improve his hand-eye coordination against quality pacers and turners of the ball, he needs to wait before an ODI debut which can benefit his country alongside his own confidence levels. I feel that he’s at least two years of hard work away from a proper international debut, and is far behind other, more technically sound top order prospects led by Zunaed Siddique, a resurgent Nafees Iqbal, this year’s Imrul Kayes, a dramatically improved Tamim Iqbal, a back-in-rhythm Nazmus Sadat, the steadily improving Jahirul Islam are all ahead of him in that order, and in all forms of the sport. Grammatically correct grafters like Mehrab Hossain Jr. and Mushfiqur Rahim, not to mention a still out-of-form and impertinently spacy Shahriar Nafees, are also far ahead of him technically when it comes to top order batting in test matches.
IV. A humble opinion.
It is true that there have been technically unsound batsmen in international cricket who have produced a lot for their sides, but they tend to be few and far between batsmen who contribute by harnessing their talent within the bounds of batting fundamentals, and consequently apply themselves when it counts the most. What we’re talking about here is the unseen wonders of Mohammad Nazimuddin within the confines of a Bangladeshi reality, and not the well-document production of exceptions to the rules of cricketing grammar like Javed Miandad, Virendar Sehwag or Chris Gayle. If seeing is indeed believing, then Nazim still has miles to go before he can make me believe that he is capable of coming close to the productivity of the wonderful aberrations mentioned above.
V. Last words.
You must be prepared to reap what you sow, again and again …
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