The Bangladesh Cricket Board is all set to create a pool of pace bowling talents for a long-term training in a bid to keep the pipe line intact for the national team, said an official on Tuesday.
The country has long been suffering for a new face in the pace bowling department which prompted the BCB to take the initiative and officials said if implemented properly, the national team will get some fresh blood in the near future.
A pool of new talent has become a necessity as pacers are always injury prone. In the national team, Mashrafee bin Murtaza has just returned from injury, but by the
time he completed his comeback the team lost Rubel Hossain to injury.
Other regular pacers in the national sides – Shafiul Islam, Nazmul Hossain – are also carrying some niggles that forced the selectors to pick Alauddin Babu, Abul
Hassan and Al Amin in the national preliminary squad for Zimbabwe tour.
Any of the trio could very well find a place in the final squad despite them not doing anything extra-ordinary in recent times, which gave the BCB enough food for
thought about the pace bowling department.
The game development committee of the BCB will conduct a two-week long camp from May 24 with the players of the age-level and school cricket to identify new talent,
who will be groomed for future.
‘We are going to start a pace bowling camp with 22 players that we have chosen from the different age-level and school tournaments,’ said Nazmul Abedin Fahim, national
manager of game development.
‘We will create a pool of 10 to 12 players, who will be training under development coaches. We will attach the national team bowling coach when he will have no
engagement with the national team,’ he said.
‘The players will be under constant monitoring and only if we see enough talent in a player he will continue training. There will be some core players while we will
change others with the emergence of new talent.’
Fahim added that there will be no special talent hunt programme like the Grameenphone Pacer Hunt or Pink City Talent Hunt that have unearthed Rubel and Shafiul, who
are carrying the burden of pace bowling of the national side for some days.
‘It’s not true that we are not keeping an eye on new talents. Our coaches at the district level are always after new talent. They have identified nearly 250 bowlers in
recent times for different age-group tournament and we have now selected some special talents from them,’ he said.
‘These special talents have been picked for Bangladesh under-19 and under-17 teams. Some of them we have identified from school cricket as well,’ added Fahim.
-With New Age input
