Rafiques call to produce quality spinners
Md Abu Talha Sarker
Former left-arm spinner Mohammad Rafique stressed the need to produce the quality spinners, stating that they should arrange Spinner Hunt Programme to pick promising young spinners so they could work together with the growing pace department and bring more success ahead.
In domestic circuit, weve many more spinners. Each club has so far three-four spinners. But they have lack of quality to take up the challenge of the international stage, said Mohammad Rafique, who played 33 Tests, 122 ODIs and one-off T20 for Bangladesh before retiring from international cricket in 2008.
As of now, we have to work for producing quality spinners. For this weve to chose the potential spinners and work with them on the basis of long-term. Weve needed some more time for it. And Bangladesh will since be benefited from it. We should start our camp with this aim, Rafique told The Independent.
For this we have, of course, to search for budding spinners at the grass-root level through staging spin hunt programme or competition, he added.
Rafique also said that they have to prepare them mentally and physically stronger for the longer version.
There are some potential spinners in the HP squad but I dont know most of them by names. We have to give them more times. We have to prepare them mentally and physically for the high level games, he said, adding Weve games of NCL, BCL, DPL and BPL in domestic circuit but Test is different than these games. Actually, the mentality we have to implant inside them of playing Test.
Drawing a comparison between the current and the previous time spinners of the national fold, the left-armer said that they should increase competition among the spinners which eventually benefited both players and teams.
While I was playing there was a huge competition among the spinners. Abdur Razzak, Shakib (al Hasan) and Arafat Sunny were with me in the race. A good competition has been held among us, he said.
But I think this competition does not exist in the national team. We have to create such competition amongst the spinners of the fold. If there are a lot of spinners, the competition would be made and both players and the team will be benefited, he thinks.
The spinner said the long-term training camp is prerequisite for the proper grooming of the spinners.
It would be better if we would get one more month for this camp. It is difficult to teach them within a short span of time. Along with that, they will not take anything further. When they will nurture anything regularly it will then be come to their control, he opined.
Rafique describes Venkatapathy Raju as his friend, stating that they performed together in Sahara Alliance League in Kolkata and both are used to such type of coaching works with two types of players.
Mainly weve worked with two departments High Performance (HP) and National Team (NT). Working with HP and NT are different types. Players will be promoted from Academy to National team. Already we have finished our work with HP team and started working with the national spinners (which also ended on August 25). Actually we got the mixed team, in where HP and national spinners were there. Some of them were problems in run-up and throwing. Both Raju and I worked with this problem for the last two days, the 46-year-old said.
We gave them net bowling on the opening day but today we have given them to do spot bowling, Dhaka-born lad signed off.
Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) president Nazmul Hassan Papon earlier said that they have plans to stage a spinner hunt after the pacer hunt programme to bolster its spin battery.
