Bangladesh national cricket team completed another one-day international series this year where team’s youngsters failed to perform at an expected level, contributing to the team’s poor results.
Over the past few years, Bangladesh emerged as one of the most successful limited over sides, thanks, largely to the performances of some senior players and emergence of youngsters.
The Fabulous Five – Sakib al Hasan, Tamim Iqbal, Mushfiqur Rahim, Mashrafee bin Murtaza and Mahmudullah – have contributed immensely to the transformation of Tigers from international whipping boys to a successful unit but they were not the only players to make it happen.
Soumya Sarkar brought an air of positivity in team’s top-order and Sabbir Rahman’s fearless batting gave them some much-needed sparkle with the bat.
The meteoric rise of Mustfizur Rahman forced the other team to look at Bangladesh with awe and Taskin Ahmed indicated a bright future for him with his pace and wicket-taking ability.
Young all-rounder Mehedi Hasan joined them to reduce some bowling burden of Sakib, which sometimes worked as magic, especially in Test matches at home ground.
They combined with senior players to change the fate of Bangladesh team which achieved some remarkable successes in all three formats since 2015.
While senior players continued to prove their worth, albeit not as much consistently in recent matches as they did in the past two years, the youngsters could complement them rarely these days.
It began with the ICC Champions Trophy in England when Bangladesh reached the semi-final owing to some significant contribution from Tamim, Sakib and Mahmudullah.
But when senior players failed, especially in South Africa, the youngsters could not come up with any performance to take team out of abysmal.
As a consequence Bangladesh lost every game in South Africa so far by huge margins.
Sabbir, who scored 59 runs in four matches in England, continued his poor run against the Proteas as he could only score 75 runs in three ODIs at an average of 25.
Soumya Sarkar’s last six ODIs produced only 42 runs while after wicketless Test series against South Africa Taskin avoided the ignominy of ending ODI series in a similar manner by claiming two wickets in his final over of the third match.
Mustafiz also failed to create much of an impact in the Test series and missed the ODIs with a freakish ankle injury.
Mehedi also appeared ineffective in Tests and was kept in the sideline for the first two ODIs. He played the third match and took two wickets but that did nothing to justify his tag as a promising all-rounder.
With the senior players at the twilight of their career, the performances of youngsters came as a wakeup call for Bangladesh.
‘It has been happening since the Champions Trophy. We have to improve quickly or the overseas series in the future will become very difficult,’ lamented ODI captain Mashrafee after a 200-run drubbing at East London.
‘This tour came up as a wakeup call for Bangladesh cricket and with more bilateral tours and the World Cup coming up, we, as a playing unit, have to look after these things quickly,’ he said.
-With New Age input
