Jamie Siddons, the Bangladesh coach, explained the role of Shakib Al Hasan in the Test team while moving forward. The veteran all-rounder was recently given the role of captaincy.
“Well if he’s (Shakib) going to captain, he needs to play. It’s pretty hard to captain if he’s not there,”
says Jamie Siddons.
Jamie Siddons, the Bangladesh coach, explained the role of Shakib Al Hasan in the Test team while moving forward. The veteran all-rounder was recently given the role of captaincy, who has missed the 20 out of 39 Test matches in the last six years for Bangladesh.
“I think he is excited about the prospect of being captain again and I think we’ll see a really good leadership side of Shakib that may have been missing for a little while,”
Siddons told reporters at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium on Saturday (June 4).
Siddons believes that Mominul Haque, who stepped down from the captaincy, after being unable to perform in the recent Test series, will be able to regain his form without the leadership abilities.
“I think there are two positives. Shakib’s a very good captain and a very good thinker of the game. He’s also a consistent performer. He’ll do a very good job as captain. Everyone follows him, so he’ll be a great leader,”
said Siddons.
“The other thing is a good thing is now Mominul can focus on his batting, he’s been struggling a little bit but now he can focus a 100% on his batting. We need him performing. We know he is a good player and we need to get that back. It’d be nice to see him without the weight of captaincy on his shoulders and now he can be a little free-er with his cricket.”
Talking about the upcoming series in West Indies where the hosts have enjoyed some great cricket days with the Duke’s ball, Siddons added that negating the new ball would be the biggest challenge for Bangladesh batters.
“Common threat is the new ball. We got to get better at new ball batting. We need to stop 5-20, 4-20 because you can’t really recover from that sort of thing. That’s been probably our problem for a long time. We need to make sure we address that. It’s always pressure with the new ball and it’s always hard for every team,”
he said.
“We’ve got good players, there’s no doubt about that but we make some silly mistakes. We’ve got to stop making those mistakes and make them earn every wicket.”
The coach also denied the rubbish suggestion of shifting Tamim Iqbal to number 4 and stated that they would replace Tamim as an opener if there will be a suitable option.
Only once in 425 games for Bangladesh, Tamim Iqbal has not opened for the side and it came in 2017 against South Africa when the veteran opener did not field for some of the innings and batted at number 5.
“In most countries, the senior players do get the opportunity to bat down the order if they’ve opened for a long time. Tamim would love that but we need to find another opening batter first. We can’t just push someone who is not performing in domestic cricket or hasn’t performed for our A-team or the Tigers. So that’s the challenge for us, to find an opening batter if we allow Tamim to go down to four. I think he’ll be a fantastic number four.”
