Room for improvement

A tension-filled four-wicket victory for Bangladesh A marked the end of the home side’s battle against the young West Indian High Performance Team. The series also concluded Stuart Barnes’ short stint with Bangladesh A team.
The Englishman, who has been in charge of the second-string team for almost a year, said that the attitude and character of a number of players towards the game needs a major overhaul.
“Players need to understand that 50s or 60s don’t win matches. They either don’t know how to become world class cricketers or they are just comfortable playing at the current level,” said Barnes.
The recently concluded series at home saw majority of the Bangladeshi players struggle against the West Indian pace attack. The home side may have won two series’ out of the three that were played, but a closer look at the A team’s performance, according to Barnes, shows a different picture.
“We performed inconsistently. If you have a look at the games in more detail, we did make similar mistakes throughout the series. I am pleased that we won the four day game, but moving forward, the players need to try and alienate the mistakes that they are making,” said the coach.
Barnes statement was mostly directed towards the poor technique used by the batsmen. The Bangladesh A team crossed the 200 mark, in an innings, just once in the recently concluded series against the West Indian HP team; a statistic that should be a worry for the national selectors.
“None of our players scored a century in the entire series… If I remember right, in all my time here, I only saw one batter scoring a 100 and that was Mominul (Haque). The batters need to be more ruthless, be hungrier for runs…” he claimed.
Despite a rather disappointing series, the coach had some good words for all-rounder Naeem Islam, who according to the Englishman, ‘stood out with the bat’ in the series.
“It’s the way he adapted to the versions of the game. He batted the most balls in the four-day game. He had a strike rate of 90 in the limited overs… he is quite good at changing the way he bats in the different formats.”
Barnes, like many of his predecessors, believes that there are a number of talented players in the pipeline for Bangladesh. He however stated that in order to convert the potential to skill, these players need to re-set their goals and aims at a much higher level.