Sports Desk:

Former national skipper Minhajul Abedin urges the national selection panel and team management to focus on developing format cricketers.

“The selection panel and the team management should have monitoring on the players so that they can give a specific player opportunity in a specific format,” Minhajul told reporters at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium on Tuesday.

“They also should try to increase the number of players on the platform and nurse them properly for international cricket. The focus should be on making teams for three formats so that they prepare them for doing well in international cricket. Minhajul added that the growth of cricket is stagnant as cricket is turning out to be Dhaka-oriented rather than getting popularity at the grassroots level.

“There is no point but to admit that [having only a bunch of 20-25 cricketers]. Our cricket is basically now Dhaka-oriented. We don’t have decentralized cricket till date. We now have four regional boards so far…If the regional cricket boards can work on that and if they can start a cricket league in four regions, hopefully, we will get players for our pipeline,” said Minhajul.

“If you look at any Test playing nation, the first-class structure is very much stable. Our first-class structure is yet to stabilize. We are operating the whole system Dhaka-oriented. When the regional cricket is in order, the structure will be stabilized. First-class cricket should be planned like the way we plan to make the Test team. But we can’t do it in this way. I think it will take time and we are also working on that. Hopefully, in two years, it will be in order and only then we can expect a good result. But in between, we must carry on with our current resources,” he said adding that they are yet to develop as a nation with the potential of exploding in the shorter format.

“We are far behind in T20 cricket. If you look at our domestic cricket, we play fewer matches in T20 format. In franchise tournaments like BPL, foreign players play in crucial positions and there is a limited opportunity for the local players,” he concluded.