Time to call it a day?

I express this utter disappointment, not on the basis of the continuously debilitating and mind-boggling performance of the national team, but on the basis of a more disappointing scenario, which is that I fail to foresee even any potential development taking place in this sport in future.

Arun Lal, the ex-Indian national colour and a sympathiser of Bangladesh cricket, was one of the panel discussants on the Max TV Channel, which was covering Sunday's match. He gave vent to his frustration by rightly pointing out that "we always hear of the Under-19s [of Bangladesh], but where do all these players go afterwards? We never hear of them anymore."

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

The answer to this query is that a couple of the U-19s do sneak into the senior team, but their performance has been embarrassingly low, low on the promise and void of any sense of responsibility. Take, for example, Nafeez's innings on Sunday. He high scored with forty, but was dropped on one when he played a rash shot. Then, finally, when he got out offering a petty catch at mid off, it was again a most untimely moment to play that lofty shot at Nicky Boia, the slow spinner, whom Geoffrey Boycott never deigned to accept as a bowler.

It was Nicky's first over, brought in as an experiment to crack the partnership between Pilot and Nafeez, that was gradually cementing towards a big score, and Nafeez

successfully took him on for two successive boundaries. So he should have been content, and content he was only for the next two balls, and on the sixth, that is the last ball of the over, he wanted to blow Nicky away over the ground (as if it was that easy), but in return he was himself blown away, the only set batsman in yesterday's match, striding back to the pavilion shamefacedly, extinguishing the last glimmering hope of the country.

Nafeez may have been 19, but he had already played three ODIs before as a bonafide batsman, but scoring just only 33 in total, so he should have known that the country expected of him the most, the best, and the most unachievable. But, where was his sense of responsibility, when he played that lofted shot? He was playing for a nation, mind it. It is not only that Nafeez played or plays like that, everybody in the national side, with great woe to us, does the same thing time and again, except for one lone figure -- Khaled Mashud Pilot.

Did we not see Inzamam ul Huq, playing his debut series at the age of 17 in the 1992 World Cup, and in the semi-final when New Zealand, a pre-tournament favourite, was almost showing Pakistan the door, then Inzamam playing a heroic knock of 62, tearing the NZ pace attack to shreds, and finally leading Pakistan to a memorable victory, an innings which finally led to Pakistan's earning the title of the World Cup?

This is the kind of thing that I see vitally missing from our players, senior or junior alike. This cannot be attributed to a lack of patriotism, or to a lack of responsibility, but to a lack of application, which again is caused, as Wasim Akram, another Bangladesh cricket fan, who was commentating yesterday said, by an absence of first class matches, and a strongly competitive domestic league.

Personally, I do not see how Bangladesh will ever fulfill the expectations of Wasim Akram, that is, how really can the authorities set in motion a format of first class structure of cricket in Bangladesh, when the cricket league itself is at best limping!

Nannu, the ex-Bangladesh captain, recently articulated his frustration in an NTV interview saying that in the present selection he finds players who do not seem to have accumulated mass of runs or bundles of wickets in the domestic series, and that they have been showing serious faults in their techniques.

All this comes to prove one thing that we are not rising to the occasion. The conferring of ODI and Test status came to us like an apple on the platter, and we have all but nearly thrown it into the bin.

To that great honour, our response was emotional not realis-

tic. We made ourselves think that if we just sent players after players on to the field they would perform. This matador-like but vagrant approach may be appropriate in an a warlike situation where you, as Hamlet says, hold your life on a pin, or in real life, when you fight against all odds, but in a game of cricket, or in any games, confidence and courage do not come from the sky, they are rather relative terms, they are related with skills, and skills are developed through constant practice and application in an over-all game structure where young players grow into senior players not by age but by skills.

Mind you, by sheer confidence you can win the freedom of a country, but you cannot win a game of cricket, unless you have the right preparation for backing up your confidence. Sports probably imposes a more unsparing set of conditions than life does.

I have information that China was given membership to the Olympic Committee a long time before when it actually sent a team to the Olympics. The interim period they used to prepare their athletes and others to achieve the standards of the Olympics. And look at China today; they just stole the show at the 2004 Olympics at Greece, securing the second position in the medals table.

Perhaps, as a saving grace, as has been suggested by Michael Slater, the ex-Aussie captain, we should decide to ask our national team to fold its banner for the time being, until the time when our infra-structure and playing format at the domestic level grow to such level that our supply of ably-skilled players becomes like a continuous flow, and we don't have to fear encountering a national humiliation.

Mohit Ul Alam, PhD, is Professor and Chairman, Department of English Language and Literature, Premier University.