BCB busy appeasing sulking seniors

What’s the job of a cricket board? Organising tours for the national team, understudy teams and age-level sides, staging domestic tournaments, taking care of venues, unearthing new talents and nurturing them to become future stars are few of the more notable tasks cricket boards across the world regularly perform.

But in Bangladesh, the country’s leading cricket body performs one extra duty that its contemporaries hardly ever do. It’s difficult to define in just one word but the phrase, ‘Senior cricketer appeasement’ could serve as a title for it.

Not only does Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) regularly indulge the senior members of the team by bending to their wills, the top brass of the board also spends a considerable amount of time in performing this extra duty.

The board directors, team director, national selector, cricket operations chief and even the head honcho are often seen trying to appease the sulking players and letting their whims dictate the way the national team functions.

The ongoing debacle over Tamim Iqbal’s future in Twenty20 Internationals is yet another example of it. The board officials, as per their own admission, are trying their best to convince Tamim to return to the format while the opener has had one foot out of the door for almost a year.

Tamim hasn’t played a T20I since March 2020, missing the last 30 T20Is of the Tigers. He opted out of last year’s T20 World Cup to give other openers a chance to play in the showcase event and in January announced a ‘temporary retirement’ from the format for six months.

Despite Tamim’s apparent reluctance to play T20Is, the board president in a recent interview has admitted to calling the opener to his home multiple times and requesting to him return to T20s.

In other countries, when an aging player wants to leave a format, the board begins searching for his replacement, they don’t plead the player to return. But BCB is not like other boards in this regard.

Tamim’s case is not a lone exception by any means. Right before the Tamim saga began, the talk of the town in Bangladesh cricket was will or won’t Shakib Al Hasan become Bangladesh’s captain in Tests for the third time.

Putting aside the moral implications of giving captaincy to a player who was banned for a year for keeping contacts with bookmakers during his last tenure as the Test captain, the board had to take assurance from Shakib that he will regularly play in Tests after becoming captain before handing him the mantle.

Shakib has been inconsistent in Tests since 2017, the year he first skipped a Test series for personal reasons. After his return to international cricket after the ban in 2020, his appearance in the five-day format have become even more seldom.

He missed Bangladesh’s last two away Test series against New Zealand and South Africa respectively. He had to skip the South Africa series due to family issues but skipping the tour to New Zealand was his own decision.

Handing the captaincy to a player whose commitment to Tests is under doubt while having cricketers who have been playing in the format for over five years and have more than 30 Tests under their belt, proves the board is more concerned about inflating the ego of the senior cricketers than actually preparing a captain who could lead the team for years to come.

The board could defend their decision by pointing to Mominul Haque’s failure to step up as a captain. But his failure doesn’t automatically mean others would also fail to grab the opportunity.

However, BCB’s appeasement policy is not limited to cricketers. They are also willing to change their stance on issues to satisfy the family members of cricketers.

During the Tiger’s recently concluded Test series against Sri Lanka, Mushfiqur Rahim struck a century in the first Test and also became the first Bangladeshi cricketer to amass 5,000 runs in Tests.

After Mushfiq completed the monumental feat, his wife Jannatul Kifayet posed a question on a congratulatory post on Instagram, asking, “Are their replacements available?”

She was hinting to BCB president Nazmul Hassan’s statement that Shakib is the only irreplaceable cricketer in the Bangladesh team.

But a few days later, the board president changed his tune, telling the media that there is, in fact, no replacement available for Mushfiq also. He also threw in Tamim’s name in the list of irreplaceable players for good measure.

A cricket board is an authoritative body that dictates the game across the country. The officials working in a cricket board have to act like authoritative figures, not appeasers. The quicker the Bangladesh Cricket Board realizes this, the better.