Bangladesh's Promise Remains Unfulfilled
Zimbabwe's Big Win: Great, but How Did It Happen? Same Old Problems Plague These Skilled Losers
By RICHARD LORD
Zimbabwe's victory by 130 runs in the team's only Test against Bangladesh at the Harare Sports Club last week is a magnificent achievement. But its import for the losers, who are also 2-0 down in a five-match ODI series between the two teams, couldn't be much more negative.
Associated PressImrul Kayes of Bangladesh fielded on the first day of the Test against Zimbabwe in Harare, Aug. 4.
For Bangladesh, losing to a team that just six years earlier collapsed in disarray and had to be rebuilt from scratch—in an economically ravaged country—was, to say the least, mightily disappointing. But most galling of all to the team's legions of hyper-enthusiastic, perennially-optimistic fans must be that they never seem to learn their lessons. Players and coaches may change, but Bangladesh remain blighted by the same old pair of problems.
One is lack of penetration among their bowlers: their seamers continue to look tame and ineffectual, and their battery of defensive-minded spinners may be good at slowing the run rate in limited-overs matches but are easily milked for runs in test matches. The emphasis on containment over wicket taking, that can work so well in the shorter versions of the game, is hopeless when it comes to taking the 20 wickets needed to win a test.
The other blight on Bangladesh's fortunes is the virtual absence of application and restraint among their batsmen. None of them tries to build an innings in the way that five-day spans of test cricket absolutely require. Even when circumstances demand caution, accumulation and sensible shot selection, such as the fourth innings of the recent game—when the team was left to chase 375 runs in four sessions, so the run rate wasn't tough but the challenge of lasting the duration was—pretty much every single Bangladesh batsman got out playing a needless, rash, attacking shot. Their quintessential performer in this regard is and for a long time has been former captain Mohammad Ashraful, a richly talented, potentially spectacular batsman with a range of flamboyant attacking strokes who has an entirely unacceptable Test average of 23 after 56 games, mainly thanks to his frequent tendency to play wildly over-optimistic swipes. No one better represents Bangladesh's vast reservoir of promise unfulfilled.
With all their swats across the line, lack of application, mindless shot selection and containment-driven, nonthreatening bowling, it's tempting to characterize Bangladesh as a team that has been rendered toothless in the Test arena by the very different demands of Twenty20 cricket. But then they always played like this, even in the pre-T20 era; they still approach the sport in pretty much exactly the same way they did 11 years and 69 Tests ago.
Legendary Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne—commenting on the way in which the challenges of test cricket didn't seem to have prompted any sort of evolution in the bowling of left-arm spinner Monty Pansesar—once said that the Englishman "hasn't so much played 33 test matches as the same test 33 times." The same could be said of Bangladesh's 69 Tests. In the recent game, the contrast with the professionalism of a Zimbabwe team that had played very little test cricket ever between them threw Bangladesh's lack of progress into sharp and somewhat awkward relief.
Bangladesh have at least proved adept in recent years at one-day international matches, where their main weapons are strangulating spinners backed up by batsmen whose reckless approach can sometimes reap dividends in cricket's shorter formats. They've beaten every other Test-playing nation and scored some famous victories, including one over England in this year's World Cup, and a 4-0 series thrashing of New Zealand in late 2010. But in tests, they've done little to show that they can modify their approach to meet the special demands of the sport's most exacting format. Of the 69 tests they've played, they've lost 60 and won only three, two of those against a West Indies side missing all of its first-choice players thanks to a dispute with their board.
The usual explanation is that Bangladesh were prematurely elevated to the top echelon at the behest of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, so it would have more allies on the International Cricket Council. Only full members—test-playing nations—have full voting rights on cricket's global governing body, and Bangladesh's admission tipped the scales in favor of India's bloc, which has traditionally included the Asian and African nations, ranged against the Anglo-Australian axis that traditionally held most of the power in the sport before India's rise to economic dominance. Certainly, by not having once yet hosted a home series against Bangladesh, India has called its commitment to its neighbor's on-field development into question.
In the past teams have taken decades to become competitive after being admitted to Test status, but that was in an era when an awful lot fewer Tests were played. Of the 2,003 matches in the 134-year history of Tests, a quarter have taken place in the past 11 years. But, even more than the depressing regularity of Bangladesh's defeats, it's the predictably calamitous manner of them that's so inappropriate for one of just 10 teams to belong to cricket's most exclusive club. Their Test status isn't in doubt, but with results like the recent one in Zimbabwe, it's perilously close to becoming an embarrassment. A side with plenty of talent, and an abundance of passionate supporters, really ought to be able to do better.
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