Not Only the Players' Fault: Tamim's BCB Searches for Its Own Mistakes in Three-and-a-Half-Hour Meeting

As well as the Bangladesh team is now playing in Tests, it is doing just as badly in white-ball cricket. The performance in the tri-series against Afghanistan and Zimbabwe in the United Arab Emirates is the latest example of that.

Is the problem the cricketers themselves, or is there a flaw in the process of preparing them? To find the answer to that question, BCB president Tamim Iqbal held a long meeting yesterday afternoon with everyone connected with the national team.

Coaching staff members and national team captains were joined in the roughly three-and-a-half-hour meeting by members of the selection committee. Coaches and officials from the high-performance department, game development and cricket operations departments, and many others were also present.

Asked about the meeting last night, BCB president Tamim Iqbal said: 'Before pointing a finger at the players for any failure, we talked among ourselves to understand whether they are playing badly because of any mistake of ours, whether there is any procedural mistake in preparing them for ODIs.'

He also said a lot came out of this 'brainstorming' with everyone. Solutions to those issues will be sought at all levels of cricket in the future, he said.

Without giving details of the meeting, the BCB president tried to explain the matter with one example. He said: 'Suppose we want our national team to score 300-350 in ODIs, to chase 300-350. But are they doing that in domestic 50-over cricket? At most, there are two or three such matches per season where that many runs have to be chased. If they do not have that practice in domestic cricket, how will they do it in international cricket?'

Raising that problem, Tamim Iqbal also spoke of a possible solution discussed in the meeting. He said: 'As we discussed, arranging a practice session where there will be 6-7 bowlers and 6-7 batters. The batters will be given a target of 320-350 runs. They will try to do it within 50 overs, and the bowlers will try to stop them from doing it.'

In simple words, that is what match-situation practice means. But here the team management will work to make such practice competitive. Tamim spoke of this kind of practice as one example of the process of building players' habit of scoring big runs in 50-over matches.

He said such sessions will be seen from now on in the practice of teams at all levels. The board also has some more plans alongside that, he said.