Shahriar Nafees's Advice: To Find Successful Batters, You Must First Learn to Grow Them

Last month, the first round of the 'Bowler Hunt' programme wrapped up across nine venues in Bangladesh. A few days later, a district coach's phone buzzed at 2:17 a.m. — on the other end, a board official, a short list of names in hand. The call found its pulse at the exact moment when hundreds of teenagers across the country were bowling into nets, hoping to change their fate. I have watched this scene for years — in dust-blown district grounds, where boys gamble their own bodies for one good delivery. The man who explained the programme at the press conference, Shahriar Nafees, said the thing that is the real story — and it was not the name of any new pacer, but the uneven gap between how batting and bowling develop.

Shahriar Nafees now heads the cricket operations department of the Bangladesh Cricket Board. He was once a national-team opening batter himself — a top-order player who scored a Test century and faced the new ball in difficult conditions. That experience may be why his argument carries such a clear duality. He says the Bowler Hunt found several talented pacers, and that this was comparatively easy, because pace is physical, observable and quickly identifiable. But batting? Batting is a long process. Years of accumulated run-scoring, the memory of facing hard bowling, the capacity to absorb failure — none of that comes from a one-day screening camp. The fact that this is coming from a man who knows the bitterness of taking the first overs of a new ball on his own body is what makes the point sincere.

On the surface the remark sounds ordinary, but it hides a structural truth. Identifying talent and producing talent are not the same thing, and the biggest gap in Bangladesh cricket sits exactly between the two. A teenager's hand speed, his physical build, the angle of his shoulder — all of that can be measured in an hour-long session. But a batter's 'value' accumulates inside his head, in the folds of his experience, and that accumulation needs thousands of overs and permission to fail on difficult wickets.

That is why the nine-venue spread of the Bowler Hunt is a meaningful decision. Breaking the old Dhaka-centric habit of scouting and spreading across the regions means the board now treats pace bowling as a scarce resource that must be searched for across a wide geography. Speed is easy to see, so it is easy to hunt. Batting is the reverse — a batter's inner game is hard to read from outside, so the emphasis must fall on 'growing' a batter rather than 'finding' one. To me, this spread of nine venues is itself a confession: that outside the city, in districts and villages, there is talent the Dhaka gatekeeper never gets to see.

Nafees offered one example. He said there was a bowler many people initially did not rate properly, who looked weak when seen side-on — and who later succeeded at the international level. It is a lovely story, but it is an anecdote, not data. The success of one player cannot prove the success of a whole system. I have seen many times how one dazzling story buries a bigger question. Nobody keeps a count of the 'side-on' bowlers who did not succeed — only the success story survives.

The history of Bangladesh pace bowling is really a history of scarcity. Bowlers like Mashrafe Bin Mortaza came along, fighting with intelligence and patience, but those who could frighten with shoulder-speed are few enough to count on one hand. Our turning home wickets made us spin-rich, but behind that richness the absence of pace was buried. On overseas tours, when the wickets are straight and high, that absence is exposed without mercy — because there, bounce and speed are the only way. The Bowler Hunt is therefore not just a programme; it is an admission of a long-standing shortfall.

The inclusion of girls in this programme is an important signal. Women's cricket is growing fast worldwide, and Bangladesh's girls are not behind. But building a base in women's pace bowling means more than finding players — it needs separate training, a safe environment, family and social support. How much social resistance stands in front of a girl in a district town who wants to bowl fast is something we must also consider. So this inclusion is welcome, but without equal planning behind it, it will remain symbolic. Here too a question lingers: if a separate programme is run to find bowlers, why is there no equal plan to build batters?

The real test of any talent-identification programme happens after identification — just as a transfer is not a transaction, but a heartbeat changing rooms. Getting a name onto a shortlist means nothing unless that boy gets regular overs and innings in domestic cricket. And here the board itself has framed the right metric: whether shortlisted players are getting opportunities to play domestic cricket. That metric deserves credit, because it points directly at a structural problem. Identification is an event, but development is an ongoing process — and that process is the most neglected thing in Bangladesh cricket.

Now to batting. Nafees says batting is a long process — and he is right. But if batting is such a long process, why is there no separate system for it? Age-group teams, the first-class season, domestic tournaments — these are supposed to produce batters. But the question is whether these steps are actually strong enough. Is a young batter facing genuinely hard bowling in domestic cricket, or is he scoring easy runs on easy wickets and inflating his own image? The answer matters, because a batter built in the wrong environment collapses on the international stage.

Nafees cited the pace traditions of Imran Khan's Pakistan and the West Indies as examples. The comparison is ambitious, and stating it is natural. But history says those two pace cultures were built on systems of many years — not on a single programme. Imran Khan's Pakistan had a strong club-level foundation, where a culture of speed was passed from generation to generation. In the West Indies the matter is even clearer — on the streets of the islands, on small grounds, pace was mixed into the blood of the cricket culture. Hoping to reach that height with one scouting event means creating a large gap between expectation and reality.

When I sit on a Dhanmondi rooftop and recall old tournament nights, I remember that the World Cup arrived at 3 a.m. and nobody slept, because everyone was waiting for something big. That waiting has its own chemistry. But waiting and promise are not the same. In pace bowling, Bangladesh's wait has been long — for how many decades have we said, 'this time we will find a truly fast bowler'? Each time the hope rose, each time it eroded with time. So around this programme I feel a cautious joy — glad that an initiative is being taken, but also reminded of the earlier promises.

From outside, this news may look to many like just another talent-hunt story. But looking inside, it is really a reasoned explanation of a resource-allocation decision. The board has invested in pace bowling because that is its weakest area — Bangladesh, strong at home with spin, suffers in overseas conditions without pace. This is not new; I have seen for years that successful spinners are produced on turning home wickets, but on the straight, high-bouncing overseas wickets those same spinners cannot deliver, because there you need speed and bounce.

Nafees's argument is that the difference shows here: pace can be identified quickly, so investment can pay off quickly; batting bears fruit slowly, so it needs patience. The argument is reasonable, but it also justifies a resource-allocation choice — since the board is hunting bowlers, it needs a rationale for not hunting batters, and that is Nafees's argument. I am not blaming him; rather, I am saying the honest question is this: who will look after the slow path of building batters? If batting really is a matter of years, where is the plan for those years?

And nobody is speaking of one silent risk. Bowling fast at a young age means stress fractures, side strains, shoulder pain — these are not abstract fears but the familiar reality of pace pipelines. Pushing a teenager into the race for speed before his time means loading his body with a burden that somebody must keep accounts for. The empty stands taught me that silence has its own kind of roar — and that silence often rings inside the unfinished career of an injured young pacer. The boy who becomes a star for his speed one day is the same boy who is knocked out the next day by a lack of workload management — I have seen this story many times, and each time I have felt that protecting talent is harder than finding it.

Here is my second doubt. Finding is easy, producing is hard — and in Bangladesh cricket's history there are many names who were discussed as school-age talent but were lost to a weak domestic system and a lack of opportunity. Building a list and carrying that list all the way to the national team's door — the long road between those two is the real test. The success of the Bowler Hunt should therefore be measured not by how many were found, but by how many survived.

Domestic cricket immediately brings up the Bangladesh Premier League and the first-class season. For an identified young pacer, the real training ground is here — where he will bowl long spells against big batters, where both his patience and his body will be tested. But in the domestic system there is no regular pressure on pacers; wickets are often spin-friendly, matches are few, spells are short. If he is not given regular opportunity at this stage, the Bowler Hunt's list will remain a list on paper. Even after talent is identified, many journeys have ended for lack of opportunity — that is my personal observation.

One important aspect of the programme is that the board has directed divisional and district coaches to monitor the shortlisted players. On paper the directive is fine, but its success depends on the capacity and accountability of coaches in the field. How much resource, time and training a district coach has will decide whether this monitoring actually works. I have seen many times how directives issued from the centre cool down by the time they reach the field, unless there is a mechanism there to implement them. So the question here is not one of policy, but of execution.

My old experience tells me real value is created in small places, away from the rush of big names. In 2026, while embedded with the Abahani camp, a small loan deal leaked three days early — and that proved that cricket's real heartbeat is caught not in a big club's statement, but at the edge of the field, in a five-hundred-member WhatsApp group. That experience taught me that the real weight of news lives at the lower level. In exactly the same way, the real story of the Bowler Hunt is not in any press release — it is in that 2:17 a.m. message to a district coach, and in the wait over whether the shortlisted boy gets his first over.

In my WhatsApp group the discussion of this news heated up. One member wrote, 'If we get a truly fast bowler this time, there will be no more fear in overseas series.' Another wrote, 'We are hunting bowlers, but batting has always been our problem.' The real tension lies between these two comments. Fans want speed, because speed draws crowds; but batting needs patience, because batting wins matches. It is this balance between two desires that the board must find. I wrote down both fans' remarks separately, because neither of them is entirely wrong.

There is also a matter of timing. In the country's cricket calendar, the domestic season, international series, and the Ramadan break — together they make the window for a young pacer to develop rather narrow. If, within that narrowness, he must be given strength and conditioning, workload management and match experience — all three — then the plan must be far more specific. Otherwise the first phase of the programme will end, but the second will never begin. This cruelty of time is nothing new in Bangladesh cricket — many talents have been lost in the gaps of the calendar.

One thing must be said about expectation. The country's cricket lovers have waited a long time for a genuinely fast bowler, and comparisons like Imran Khan and the West Indies make that wait more intense. But the reality is that one programme does not create a generation. If the message to the public is that a fast bowler will be produced within months, disappointment is inevitable. The honest message should instead be: this is a matter of years, this is the start of a process. That honesty in communication is what will ultimately protect the programme's foundation.

I keep the beat by listening to what the crowd does not say. That is exactly what must be done with this programme. Shahriar Nafees's advice points in the right direction — a batter cannot be hunted, a batter must be grown; and even a pacer, once found, must be kept alive with patience and management. If in the coming domestic season the shortlisted boys get regular overs, if their bodies are accounted for, if an equal path is opened for girls too — then this programme will become something real. Otherwise it will remain just another beautiful list. The question now is no longer the board's; the question is time's — and time's answer we will find on that field's scorecard, where the shortlisted boy stands with the new ball in hand.