Bangladesh batters not up to snuff in BPL so far

The ongoing edition of the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) is nearing the halfway point of the group phase, and so far, it has been a difficult tournament for the national team batters.

Three out of the five top-scorers in this season so far are from Bangladesh, however, two of them – Fortune Barishal's Mushfiqur Rahim (229 runs) and Tamim Iqbal (149) – have already retired from T20Is.

Meanwhile the other player, Sylhet Striker's Zakir Hassan (193), was not part of the squad that played three T20Is in New Zealand in December last year.

Out of that 15-man squad, which pulled off Bangladesh's maiden T20I win against the Kiwis in New Zealand, Towhid Hridoy has been the most successful batter, scoring 127 runs in five innings for the Comilla Victorians, which positions him at number 13 in the run-getters' list.

Players like Soumya Sarkar (123), Afif Hossain (108), Shamim Hossain (107) have looked out of sorts, while Najmul Hossain Shanto, who led the team in New Zealand in the absence of Shakib Al Hasan, has made just 73 runs in seven innings at an abysmal strike rate of 82.95.

Opener Litton Das has made just 37 runs in five innings for Comilla, nine runs fewer than what Durdanto Dhaka pacer Taskin Ahmed has made in three innings.

To be fair to the batters, this year's BPL has so far been a low-scoring affair, with no team managing to breach the 200-run mark in the first 20 games.

The Sylhet phase of the tournament came to an end on Saturday where the average innings total was 138.167, the lowest ever in this part of the country, drastically lower than last year's 161.25.

Even in such testing conditions, overseas batters have managed to churn out match-winning knocks unlike the national team batters, something that worries Bangladesh team director Khaled Mahmud.

"The foreign players don't play here regularly, but they are doing it [scoring runs]. Then why can't the locals do it, this worries me," Mahmud, coach of Durdanto Dhaka, told reporters yesterday.

Shakib, who has scored just made four runs in three innings for Rangpur amidst his struggle with eyesight, however, did not share Mahmud's worry.

"I don't feel there is any reason to be disappointed or worried about it [local batters not doing well]. I'm sure, whoever gets in the [Bangladesh] team, will do well from their respective positions.

"This year's pitches are also not ideal. I feel that last year the pitches and the condition were much better, a lot of runs were scored, it's not happening this time," Shakib told reporters on Saturday.

The low scores in Sylhet, which is usually the most heavy-scoring phase of the BPL, validates Shakib's statements. It also begs the question of how much will playing in such conditions prepare the players for the forthcoming ICC T20 World Cup, something this tournament had supposedly set out to do as per statements from several BCB officials before the tournament.