The domestic cricket continued to lose its discipline as yet another unsavoury incident marred a Premier League match on Friday.
Surjo Tarun’s Rajin Saleh and Asif Hossain of Orient Sporting Club were handed one-match suspensions each after they were involved in an ugly scuffle at the Shaheed Kamruzzaman Stadium in Rajshahi.
According to eye witness, in the ninth over of Orient’s innings, Asif and Rajin got involved in a war of words on the pitch that led to the Pakistani batsman grabbing the former national captain by the collar. A huge melee ensued with some of the other Surjo Tarun fielders surrounding the duo and on-field umpire Sharfuddowla Ibn Shahid Saikat stepped in at that moment, but the damage had already been done.
“Asif Hossain and Rajin Saleh are suspended and Abdur Razzak was fined Tk 5,000 for the incident,” informed CCDM coordinator Qazi Aynul Islam yesterday.
Though the Orient-Surjo Tarun match calmed down soon after, the on-field face-offs are piling up this season. During the Gazi Tank-Abahani game in Bogra last week, Mahmudullah Riyad and Sabbir Rahman got into a mid-pitch scuffle that had both players suspended for a game each with Gazi Tank skipper Naeem Islam and Nasir Hossain both being fined.
On the same day, Mohammedan captain Shakib Al Hasan confronted the umpire after his caught-behind dismissal at the BKSP, the all-rounder being handed a Tk 10,000 penalty.
According to those handling these matches (umpires and match referees), these single-game bans and 5,000-10,000 taka fines are never enough as it doesn’t discourage the players or the officials from getting into confrontations.
“These punishments are token. The club officials tell their players to put pressure on the umpires with the assurance that the rest will be taken care of. And as it happens, the players always tell us that they hit the ball when we give a leg-before decision or that they didn’t hit it when we give a caught-behind decision,” said an umpire who requested anonymity.
According to this umpire, this is one of the reasons why some umpires are fearful of taking the right decision against big clubs, though the other side of the story is obvious: if the umpires are strict enough, the players and officials remain within the law.
In the same vein however, the lenient law itself is creating a lot of confusion among the match officials.
According to a source, the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has no such code of conduct which is often mentioned. Rather, said the source, the ICC’s code of conduct should be mentioned when handing out fines and bans so that it remains concrete.
“In the last IPL (Indian Premier League), Saurav Ganguly was fined up to 88,000 dollars for over rates.
I think the fine in the Dhaka Premier League has to be Tk 50,000, large enough to make the clubs come to a realization,” said the umpire who talked to The Daily Star Sport.
