"There are only three qualified coaches in your country and they are Shahidul Alam Ratan, Nazmul Abedin Fahim and Sarwar Imran,"
This incredible remark made by Richard while reacting to a group of journalists who wanted to know why the youth team performing poorly since he took over in October last year.
Then he declared the possibilities as "Our main target is to play good cricket and if my boys can do so they can beat anybody in the World Cup."
Well we now know that we are not in the super league any more. Now the tigers will roar at the silent jungle left with some cats. This is where we had been for years until we justified our test status. The game is over for U19.
Whether he is a good coach, or may even be considered as a coach, or not, lets see what he said just after being humiliated by the Indians earlier today.
"The occasion overwhelmed the team," he said. "There were enormous pressures created by expectations on them. However, the team is still learning. This experience will be useful to them. They will get used to playing under pressure, noise and high quality opposition.?
That?s it; he believed his players would learn from the experience of playing a strong India side confessing the fact that we are not any strong team. Just read back what he said couple of weeks earlier (Our main target is to play good cricket and if my boys can do so they can beat anybody in the World Cup). The point of getting more and more experience sounds vulnerable. Where did the Indian team get all their experiences and temperament to play against a huge crowd on a different soil and still performing clearly ahead? Actually, he messed up everything. He used to pertain a new idea among the young cricketers to make them mentally strong and tough enough to handle pressure. Now he says they were turned down cause it was too much pressure!!
The other facts that doubt his qualification as a coach are all around. We talked a lot about Net run rate. This NRR would not be a problem any more if we decided to bat first against Scotland. Not only that, Knowing the fact that we had a bad batting day against NZ, we opted to bat first to make sure all our batsmen can practice before facing the big giant. What we did, is we won and toss and showed our strength (!) finishing the match only in 12.2 overs, whereas both India and NZ made huge batting practice against them and boosted their NRR as well. The clear decision to be taken from here is that either he has lack of cricket knowledge (excluding the fact that he tried even Ice-water bath) or he is too weak in math. Any of them should be enough to fire his position.
Another mystical decision we saw today when BD won the toss and elected to field first. As I remember one statistic, the average first innings score in Dhaka Stadium is around 260. Don?t we all know it that Dhaka stadium has always been a batting paradise? He talked about ?pressure? which overwhelmed us, but why to select batting second then? Isn?t it always difficult to bat second?
The third point was not using Talha Jubair in any of the three matches. He was not injured, that was only a rumour. Its irrelevant try to prove that Talha should be the best bowler of the squad. If not then there must be something wrong with the selectors who decided to make him play for the national squad. Now take this, even a national team player may not be judged as one of the best 11 (of course Richard?s 11) unless the big boss does not want it. Or should we say if he really is capable to judge a player?
Before making any conclusion to this article, I urge a definitive investigation to our performance and results before he can say that ?Oh yeah! We have beaten Nepal, Scotland, Ireland, PPN blah blah? All the players who played in this U19 squad are our future cricket. We made mistakes in the past employing unqualified coaches, now this mistake should not be done again. Save our cricket please.