On Monday, speaking about Bangladesh at the upcoming Asia Cup, BCB president Nazmul Hassan said, “There’s not going to be a head coach. We have a batting coach, a spin coach, fast bowling coach and fielding coach. We have the captain. We also have a technical consultant for T20s. He will give the game plan. We will have the team director, Jalal [Yunus, the BCB’s cricket operations chairman] bhai and myself. Who else do we need?"
It might have sounded odd, but Hassan was just being honest. The BCB has called Sridharan Sriram the “technical consultant for T20s”, but he is the de facto T20 head coach, with Russell Domingo out of the picture in the format for the moment. Their back room does have Jamie Siddons, Rangana Herath, Allan Donald and Shane McDermott, as well as team director Khaled Mahmud. And, well, the Bangladesh team management, in reality, extends right up to the BCB president. If Hassan feels that line-up means having a designated head coach is unnecessary, it’s only the truth about how the Bangladesh team actually operates.
But decisions being made by a group of Very Important People with Very Important Designations weigh heaviest on the captain. Right now, that’s Shakib Al Hasan. He will take the on-field decisions, and match result notwithstanding, will be answerable to not just the coach/es or the selectors, but the board chief and the directors. As if having an underperforming team to shepherd wasn’t tough enough.
The situation isn’t new to Shakib, but that won’t make it any easier.
The fact is that everything goes back to - and has for a while - Hassan in Bangladesh cricket.
The players know it. The coaches are aware. The selectors have had to get Hassan’s sign-off on squads since 2016. Hassan has, in the past, openly criticised the team management for not consulting him on playing XIs. Hassan has exercised his power to make “drastic changes” to the coaching staff less than two weeks before a major tournament. Hassan can instruct players to appear in certain series and he really doesn’t like it when they retire when he doesn’t want them to.
He slams performances during and after series. It goes without saying that Hassan sits in on team meetings. He regularly calls players and coaches to his residence for discussions. And, of course, he likes to speak to the media about it all.
The BCB has had this reputation of being meddlesome when it comes to team matters for more than a decade, ever since AHM Mustafa Kamal became the board chief in 2009, actually. He liked to be in control of all matters to do with the national team. Unwittingly or otherwise, Hassan picked up the trait a couple of years into his reign. Over nine years as the board chief, he has established that whoever the coach or captain are, Hassan and the board directors will call all the shots.
