Chattogram Challengers pacer Mehedi Hasan Rana celebrates one of his four wickets against Cumilla Warriors in a Bangabandhu Bangladesh Premier League match in Chattogram on Friday. — Courtesy photo
Chief selector Minhajul Abedin on Sunday expressed his reluctance to judge the young players only by their performances in the ongoing Bangabandhu Bangladesh Premier League and urged the players to step up in other formats as well.
Several Bangladeshi rookie cricketers, especially fast bowlers like Mehedi Hasan Rana, Hasan Mahmud and Mukidul Islam, were successful to grab the spotlight by displaying splendid bowling performances for their respective sides in the tournament.
Chattogram Challengers’ left-arm pacer Mehedi has been the find of the season so far as the 22-year old took 13 wickets in five matches at an economy of 6.47 to stay at top of the list of most wicket-takers presently.
Though Dhaka Platoon’s Mahmud and Rangpur Rangers’ Mukidul could take four and three wickets respectively so far in the tournament their bowling at over 140kmph speed drew the attention of all BPL followers.
Minhajul believed that it would be too early to judge these cricketers and they should bring more consistency in the performances.
‘It is difficult to find out players by judging their performances only in the shorter version. In longer version cricket, we can see the performances of a cricketer in all three departments – batting, bowling and fielding. But we can hardly judge them through shorter format,’ Minhajul told reporters in Chattogram.
‘The opportunities are also limited. However, the performances are always countable and we are observing the performances of the young players. We can speak about the players’ stability only after the end of mid-tournament.
‘We have to count a lot of things. Representing a country and playing against different nations is a different thing [than domestic cricket]. You may have seen that many cricketers perform really well in domestic cricket but they hardly make good performances in international cricket,’ he added.
Minhajul said he was rather impressed to see the High Performance boys doing well in the tournament, which the former national skipper described as a good sign for the pipeline of country’s cricket.
‘We are watching the young players and the thing which impressed us more is our HP players who are doing really well. We can see the improvement of these players, who have been nursed in HP. It’s a good sign,’ he said.
Minhajul also advised young cricketers to set their goal for at least 10 to 15 years circle and urged them to work on maintaining the same performance standard.
‘Any youngster should think of playing standard cricket for 15 years. It is not easy to judge a player by one or two matches. A cricketer must set a goal of playing at least 15 years. He must make a goal of playing international cricket for a minimum 10 years,’ he said.
‘If he can’t set such a goal then it is difficult for him to maintain the performance standard. The truth is that we can’t judge a cricketer by seeing him doing well in one or two matches or bowling one outstanding delivery.
‘He has to make himself ready in three formats. He has to do well in all three formats. Then you can judge how well he can play in terms of winning matches,’ he added.
Source: New Age.
