Like any other day, 13-year-old Khondokar Sarzil Sahed rushes towards his balcony and searches for something. After standing still for a few minutes, the young boy asks the same question to his father every day: “Baba, when will you take me to the cricket ground again?”
Cricket in Bangladesh has been halted since mid-March due to the coronavirus outbreak and, sharing an experience that extends to professionals and hobbyists, Sarzil has had to stop learning cricket, which he used to practise four days of the week at the Bangabandhu National Stadium’s outer stadium in Gulistan.
Similar to those professional cricketers, several aspiring youngsters like Sanjidul are counting the days to when they can return to play their favourite sport and chase their dreams of becoming the next Shakib Al Hasan or Tamim Iqbal.
There are a total of 82 cricket academies in Dhaka registered with the Bangladesh Cricket Board and another fifty to sixty academies across the capital but there have been almost no activities since the pandemic. Parents are now reluctant to send their children outside to play and academies across the city remains empty every day.
There are more than 150 coaches who are associated with those academies, earning a living by teaching cricket to the youngsters. But, as things changed dramatically over the past four months, those coaches are going through tough times due to a lack of cricketing activities.
The situation is similar for other cricket coaches who are not associated with the BCB or any club. They solely rely on their incomes from academies.
While coaches are financially stretched, parents are worried about their children’s mental health as they have been confined at home and have been out of physical activities for months now.
“The situation in our country is not good, which is why we are afraid to take our children outside. I can assume how difficult it has been for them to be stuck at home day after day. As a parent I have to think about the safety of my child, but the matter of fact is that they also need to have some mental relief by going outside, playing and breathing fresh air. I don’t know how long it will take for things to get back to normal, but if things continue like this it will surely harm the next generation,” Khondokar Saiful Islam, Sarzil’s father, said.
