THAT WAS NO CRICKET
New Age Editorial 6/3/11
To win a game is always exciting. To lose it is again to be expected, for that is the rule with games, indeed with life itself. But when the Bangladesh cricket team put itself and the rest of the nation through misery on Friday, it was not winning or losing we were concerned with. It was something more. It was simple awareness of how much lower a team playing cricket on a global scale could go. To be washed out for a miserable fifty eight runs is deep embarrassment. On Friday, it was a whole country rendered immobile by images of Bangladesh's batsmen stepping on to the pitch and stepping off it in quick progression. It was not just bad cricket. It was no cricket at all.
The moment is therefore upon us to call for a serious reassessment of the entire cricket scene in Bangladesh. On Friday we were convinced that calling a team Tigers when it is anything but is wrong, that wallowing in celebrations of rare triumphs (read the win over Ireland) is premature, that indulging batsmen and bowlers to the point of lionising them is something we should have waited for until an established pattern of performance emerged. These young men have disappointed us. Tellingly, when the captain informs us, perhaps without weighing the import of his words, that the future for our cricket could be even worse, it is time for the cricket authorities to weigh in with steps for remedy.
To be sure, we do not at this stage expect our cricketers to take the world by storm. But those thousands of people who streamed into the stadium in Mirpur and the millions glued to television at home expecting to see some interesting, if not terribly exciting, cricket simply went through an experience that was as disturbing as it was bizarre. Our boys did not lose against the West Indies. They simply did not play.
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