FIRST PUBLISHED IN WALL STREET JOURNAL
Look at the recently updated International Cricket Council Test team rankings, and you'll see three distinct strata, separated from each other by some hefty margins. At the top, way out in the lead, are South Africa and Australia; then, all in a bunch, are England, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and New Zealand; and then there are the others.
Sadly, these days, in Tests, the West Indies is grouped along with the others, just ahead of perennial also-rans Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. So when West Indies faces Bangladesh starting Thursday, in three One-Day Internationals, a single Twenty20 and two Tests, it will be a muted affair featuring two teams that seem rather to have drifted away from Test cricket.
The modern curse of a hyper-jammed schedule has forced them in the direction of shorter, more lucrative forms of the game, and of highly remunerated domestic cricket, and robbing them of the ability to navigate the complex contours of a five-day game.
In particular, that makes it hard for batsmen to approach the sort of long, patient, decision-filled innings needed for success at Test level. It makes it difficult to form a successful team even in the shorter formats at which both sides specialize: Just as they're eighth and ninth in Tests, so they are in ODIs, and even in T20s West Indies is only seventh, with Bangladesh 10th.
The problems facing the teams in Tests are slightly different. Players are often dragged away from representing West Indies by lucrative domestic T20 assignments, with which the relatively poor West Indies Cricket Board just can't compete financially. The likes of Chris Gayle, Sunil Narine, Dwayne Smith, Dwayne Bravo, Marlon Samuels and Darren Sammy are in demand among T20 franchises the world over, and gradually the islands are coming more and more mainly to breed players most appropriate to that format.
So when West Indies tours England, for example, coinciding with the Indian Premier League season, it is rarely playing with a full deck; similarly, West Indian players generally choose to represent their IPL franchises rather than their home sides in the Champions League.
Bangladesh's Test progress is largely hampered—slightly less predictably—by 50-over cricket. The team gets few chances to play Tests, but its players also rarely play first-class cricket; the country's premier domestic competition is the club-based, 50-over Dhaka Premier League. And so the likes of Tamim Iqbal, Nasir Hossain and Mahmudullah Riyad can have spurts of world-beating form and then fall away dramatically, their long-form games atrophying for lack of stimulation.
Bangladesh has so far avoided West Indies' fate of having its players poached by cashed-up T20 franchises, largely because it has rather fewer superstars. In fact, it has precisely one, in the form of former captain Shakib Al Hasan, but his recent acrimonious falling-out with the Bangladesh Cricket Board could show the shape of things to come.
The trouble started when Shakib, comfortably Bangladesh's greatest-ever player, a canny slow left-arm bowler and explosive middle-order batsman with fine career stats (in Tests, 2,278 runs at 37.96 and 122 wickets at 33.39, and even better in ODIs), went off to play for Barbados Tridents in the Caribbean Premier League without first obtaining the proper permission from the BCB. He was asked to return for national training camp halfway through the CPL season and at first refused.
He has since denied that he threatened to quit international cricket as a consequence, apologized and stated that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. But as a result of his arguments with national coach Chandika Hathurusinghe over the affair, and of a physical confrontation with a spectator during a recent One-Day International in Dhaka—leaving the dressing room without permission is a big no-no these days, as an anticorruption measure—he's been banned from playing internationally for six months and from playing in overseas leagues for two years.
When he issued his apology, Shakib also asked that the decision to ban him be reconsidered.
Shakib was also banned for three games earlier in the year for making an inappropriate gesture toward a television camera during an ODI against Sri Lanka.
The board seems to have come down on him particularly savagely this time, The consequences of a departure of its best-ever player at the age of 27 would be horrible for the team.
Bangladesh will at least be encouraged by its history in the Caribbean, the venue of many of its greatest international triumphs: its encouraging 2004 tour; its best-ever World Cup, in 2007; and particularly its greatest victories, the twin Test and ODI series wins in 2009, albeit against a West Indies team gutted by a players' strike.
Not that Bangladesh's players will be particularly familiar with the lineup of relatively obscure grounds at which the tour will take place, with the limited-overs games being staged at Grenada and St Kitts and the Tests at St. Vincent and St. Lucia.
With the Tests not beginning until Oct. 5, and with the World Cup now less than six months away, much of the focus will be on the ODIs that kick off the tour.
In Shakib's absence Mominul Haque, who has looked the real deal in his short career so far, will be the key batsman, along with captain Mushfiqur Rahim. With Imrul Kayes in rich domestic form, it's a talented batting lineup, but it doesn't look any match for West Indies' collection of power hitters, including Gayle, Bravo, Sammy, Kieron Pollard and Lendl Simmons.
Similarly, the importance of spin in contemporary Caribbean conditions ought to play to Bangladesh's strengths, but Shakib is missing, both Abdur Razzak and Sohag Gazi in unimpressive form recently, and in Narine, West Indies has a limited-overs bowler of unparalleled skill.
With its best player missing and the home side looking stronger in pretty much every department, getting its side in some sort of order ahead of the World Cup—a World Cup played in very different conditions from those in the West Indies—may be the best result Bangladesh can hope for from this tour. But then strange things can happen when Bangladesh visits the Caribbean.
