Nannu presents old wine in new bottle at critical crossroad

In an impromptu media briefing in front of the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) headquarter yesterday, BCB's chief coordinator of programmes Minhajul Abedin Nannu spoke some bitter truths about the current state of the country's cricket, which different people have regurgitated many times before without any significant change afterwards.

The former captain pointed out that having a pool of only 27-30 cricketers to represent Bangladesh across all three formats was a big issue.

"Actually, there is no way to deny that [having a limited pool of cricketers for the national team]. Our cricket is basically Dhaka-centric. We haven't been able to decentralise cricket," Minhajul told the reporters in Mirpur yesterday.

"We are confined to a pool of 27 to 30 players in all three formats. We can only select players from this group. If we can't prepare at least 45 players, we can't create a sense of competition among the players," added the former national team selector.

He was also upfront about the country not having a stable first-class structure despite being a Test nation for the last 24 years and how not having any other Twenty20 tournament other than the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) is holding back the Tigers in the shortest format.

"If you look at any other Test playing nation, they have an established first-class structure. Ours is still not established.

"We are far behind in T20 cricket. If you look at our domestic calendar, we play a smaller number of matches in the T20 format. In franchise tournaments like BPL, foreign players play in crucial positions and there is a limited opportunity for the local players," Minhajul said.

The points Minhajul raised all have merit and fixing these issues would certainly improve the country's cricket.

But the million-dollar question remains – who will bell the cat?

It has been 12 years since Nazmul Hassan Papon and Co took over the reins of the richest sports body of the country.

More than once, these matters have come into light and board officials had vowed to work on fixing these issues for the sake of Bangladesh cricket.   

However, nothing significant ever gets done afterwards, as the country's cricket continues to stagnate.

The cricket officials wake up from their slumber and start talking about these problems and what needs to be done to fix them every time the Tigers return from a global tournament after an underwhelming showing, much like Tiger's performance in the ninth ICC T20 World Cup recently.

In that tournament, Bangladesh won three matches and qualified for the Super Eight and the board was seemingly satisfied with it, even though the team showed a severe lack of intent when a golden opportunity to qualify for the semifinals presented itself.

The cricket board had talked about decentralising cricket many times and made some ad-hoc committees for it. But since forming the committees, the board is yet to take any significant step to develop cricket at the regional level.

As the game remains Dhaka-centric, the selectors and the team management are left with a very limited pool of players to form squads. As a result, when a player fails to perform, an underperforming cricketer gets picked in his place, earning a callback without having done anything of note.

Minhajul spoke about a possible way to fix the shortage of players.

"We are now thinking of increasing the number of domestic matches so that we can get some players for the T20 format. We also need to identify some players whom we can nurture prepare for the game," he said.

However, the question remains that if a committee is still just talking about possible solutions and not implementing them after being in charge for 12 years, will anything ever get done?