Saifuddin paints Bangladesh cricket’s sorry picture

Bangladesh seamer Mohammad Saifuddin does not always make things easy for himself whenever he speaks to the media.

From re-assuring that he wanted to play as a batter in an edition of the Bangladesh Premier League to complaining about BCB not paying enough attention to him while he was in rehab, Saifuddin has a history of landing in hot water for his statements.

This time, however, he exposed the fragility of Bangladesh cricket's dying pipeline by saying that the country hardly has 20-25 players capable of playing international cricket, meaning that there is a serious drought in the emergence of quality players.

Saifuddin, who trained for the first time in Mirpur yesterday since being left out of Bangladesh's T20 World Cup squad earlier this year, also said that his fitness was key for a return to the national side.

"To be honest, there are 20-25 players in Bangladesh who are capable of playing international cricket; there aren't that many players," Saifuddin told reporters on Sunday.

"Opportunities will come if I can stay fit. If you look at other countries, you'll see that there is way more competition. I think the number of players who are of international standard is very low [in Bangladesh]."

Two major takeaways can be made from what Saifuddin said.

Naturally, the first one is that a current player is convinced about the fact that Bangladesh's pipeline is drying up as evidenced by the lack of quality players coming through the ranks which is why the BCB as well as the team management often resort to players like Soumya Sarker and Afif Hossain – both of whom have done very little in recent times to warrant a place in a Bangladesh squad. BCB, under the leadership of Nazmul Hassan Papon, has always flaunted the idea of having a strong pipeline but its boasting in this regard has, time and again, been deflated when they go to major events and play relatively superior sides. Even the composition of the squads heading to these events portrays the harsh reality of Bangladesh's limited talent and a jeopardised future.

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The second is a much more common loop in the country's cricketing scenario which has established a culture of failure. The loop brings forth how a player who gets dropped from the national team can bank on another player to underperform in order to make a return. In most cases, the player who gets dropped has very little urgency to perform his way into the team and can bide his time for someone else to lose his spot to get back in contention.

Saifuddin's case seems to be aligned with the latter as he may feel that the number of quality players in the pool is reasonable enough for him to make a comeback by dishing out average performances. The 27-year-old faltered when he had to compete with Tanzim Hasan Sakib in the Zimbabwe series before the team left for the USA for the T20 World Cup. Despite picking up more wickets than Sakib, he struggled to get his bearings right at the death in the final Zimbabwe T20I and that was enough for the selectors to axe him from the 17-member squad.

In an attempt to talk about a potential return to the national side and the general picture of Bangladesh cricket from his perspective, Saifuddin perhaps blurted out the reality of Bangladesh cricket and the mediocre mentality that a lot of players might harbour.