It was perhaps fitting that Mushfiqur Rahim and Shakib Al Hasan were at the crease when Bangladesh started to celebrate. The Test series win against Pakistan will rank as one of their best moments ever in cricket, and very justly so. Beating Pakistan 2-0 in a Test series was not something even the greatest of Bangladesh supporters would have imagined possible. Strange things happen in cricket, and this was indeed one such with serious repercussions for the sport going forward.
Test cricket, it need not be repeated, needs such results. Except in Australia and England, crowds have steadily dwindled across the world with Test matches being played in empty stadiums fast becoming an accepted norm. In such a situation, Bangladesh winning against Pakistan could be the best thing that has happened to cricket’s most coveted format in recent times. Bangladesh is a huge cricket market with serious fan passion, and if the Tigers start to compete against the big three – England, Australia and India – the enthusiasm and fan base for Test cricket is bound to grow.
For cricket at large, this is a welcome development. In the absence of newer markets in India, South Africa, New Zealand and elsewhere, Bangladesh can come as a salve for the International Cricket Council (ICC). More so after the political turmoil that had hit the country. Sport, as we know, is often used as a prism to understand societies, and more often than not, it helps unite a country. With newer icons like Mehidy Hasan Miraz emerging, corporates in Bangladesh too are expected to find newer opportunities for investment.
For the record, it is only natural that Bangladesh would make the big league sooner rather than later. With a cricket tradition of over 150 years, they should have played far earlier than they eventually did in 2000.
The earliest mention of competitive native cricket in what is now Bangladesh is of a match played in Dhaka between the Europeans and the Natives in 1876. While the former had 11 players in their ranks, the latter had 16. Reports are also available of a match played later in the same year between the English and the natives. In this match, spectators were present in significant numbers and did their best to cheer the local team. A report published in the Bengal Times, Dhaka, described the encounter thus:
“The place was densely crowded by native spectators who caused great annoyance to the players while the game was going on, by shouting and clapping at any mishap of the opposite party in a most rude and unbecoming way, while they rather too vociferously applauded any piece of good luck that attended their own countrymen. But what was even worse, they often managed to obstruct the ball from going as far as it would have done, had it not been stopped on its way by a number of noisy natives.”
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This tradition, which only grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finally came to a temporary halt in the 1940s for a series of socio-political reasons. And it was only in the 1980s thanks to the patronage of a series of administrators that cricket made a serious comeback in the Bangladesh sports landscape. Since then, however, it has seen spectacular progress. So much so that it has upstaged football as the country’s leading sport, and the success that the Tigers have achieved in the ODI and T20 formats has only added to the game’s growing popularity in the country. Players like Mustafizur Rahman and Shakib have also done well in the Indian Premier League (IPL), which has helped inspire middle-class kids to take to the professional game, seeing the potential for hugely successful careers.
The future, it can be conjectured, will only be better for cricket in Bangladesh. Youngsters have started to make the breakthrough to the big stage with regularity, and the bench strength, a problem in the past, is fast becoming formidable.
Finally, it must be said that things have come together rather nicely for Bangladesh. First, it was the ODI format which the team made their own. Beating England and making the quarterfinals of the 2015 World Cup was a huge breakthrough, and it was followed by a very important series win against India at home. Decent performances in T20 cricket followed, with Bangladesh making the final of the Asia Cup. It was only a matter of time before that spread to Test cricket. With quality players in the team, Bangladesh have started to believe they can beat any team, and that was perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Pakistan win. And that’s what makes this India series a much-anticipated one.
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