Hathurusingha�s mantra �fearless cricket�
Bangladesh head coach tells players not to be complacent as they take on Zimbabwe
Sports Reporter
It was not too the distant past, Bangladesh cricket was on a continuous losing streak. The team was struggling in finding its feet firmly in international cricket despite there were some outstanding performers all the time. Still the successes at the international level were few and far between. Self-belief and knowing themselves were the things those were missing well. Some confusions and controversies also created impediments. In those tumultuous period, someone is badly needed the highly talented, yet misfiring players, to regroup in order to turn the fortune. Bangladesh got that someone special in head coach Chandika Hathurusingha who made only few changes towards the end of last year to create a dramatic reversal.
His incredible ability of squeezing out the best from everyone was evidenced in Bangladeshs recent success. Hathurusingha, a Sri Lankan born cricketer, held the Australian-attitude never-say-die mindset and he is amongst the few coaches in the world who achieved success with a domestic team of Australia as a non-Australian-coach. Seeing Bangladeshs awful defeat against almost second ranked Indian side in June 2014, on his very first assignment as the countrys coach, he became sure what he would have to do and what changes he needed to bring up to turn this very talented young bunch of cricketers as fearless unit.
His mantra was simple: playing fearless brand of cricket whoever the opponent is and be disciplined. For the sake of discipline, he even didnt spare the teams key player Shakib Al Hasan. He is the one who urged the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) to impose penalty on Shakib for breaching the teams rule. All those things worked as wonder.
The performance began swiveling on the right groove. And the mantra made the mediocre team capable of achieving occasional successes, turned into a dangerous outfit in the limited version of the game. The turning around at international level started with Bangladesh comprehensively whitewashing Zimbabwe at home in December, last year. There was outstanding World Cup success followed by the maiden ODI series victory over top ranked Pakistan, India and South Africa. Those successes helped Bangladesh move into the No.7 team in ICC ODI rankings and helped them to seal the Champions Trophy berth.
And now they are facing the same team against whom they were apprehensive last year whether they could avoid any embarrassing loss. After a year against the same team, they are talking about absolute domination, like the way a big team dominates a small team. The difference lies in mindset, according to Chandika Hathurusingha.
The mindset is the main difference than last time because last time I remember that we were not sure of our ceiling, most of the players, Hathurusingha said, recalling the situation a year ago. Now they have started to believe and they proved themselves so in this game the mindset is a huge change and we can see that thats different in our performance.
Now there has been healthy completion among quality players for getting into the side, which Hathurusingha thought good for the team. Its having an internal competition thats a good and healthy competition because players know that that they have to perform. Sportsmen are driven by challenges so I think we are in a good situation. The other good thing is that the guys who are coming are capable of doing the job in hand. All in all I think it is a very good situation the players are in.
The continuous success often made the team complacent which is only the thing to fear in the series against low ranked Zimbabwe. Hathurusingha believed there is no place of complacency, because of huge competition among the players with regards to cementing the place.
There is no meter to see the complacency but theres no complacency in our team. We all know that we are playing for our national team and no one is taking things for granted. Because theres a lot of competition for the places. Whoever takes things lightly it would be a very dangerous situation for him.
I cant take any series lightly in international level. I am not taking Zimbabwe lighter than any other team. If we want to try things we always use the other platforms, like practice games or A teams. This is going to be full on. We will play according to our strength and taking them seriously, Hathurusingha said but didnt indicate what types of wickets will be prepared for Zimbabwe. Hathurusingha was expert in sorting out the oppositions weakness and prepare the wicket that way which gave Bangladesh an enormous success lately. However this time he preferred to not showing the cards but said Bangladesh now have enough quality resources in both pace and spin bowling department.
