Tamim takes over as ODI captain
The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) yesterday named Tamim Iqbal as the new captain of the ODI side. The opener will replace Mashrafe Bin Mortaza, whose second stint as Bangladesh captain, since 2014, ended with the third ODI against Zimbabwe on Friday.
BCB President Nazmul Hassan announced Tamim as the captain during a press conference at the BCB headquarters in Mirpur in the evening yesterday. The board president said that although they were initially thinking of a short-term solution, they later went with the decision to hand Tamim the captaincy for the long haul.
"We had thought of naming a captain for the short-term but after discussions on the matter in a board meeting, we have decided that we will appoint Tamim as the captain for the long term," Hassan said during a press conference following the meeting.
Mashrafe had earlier announced, a day before the third ODI, that he would be stepping down. Tamim's first assignment as captain will be the one-off ODI against Pakistan on April 1 in Karachi.
Tamim's appointment as ODI captain means that Bangladesh once more have three separate captains for the three different formats of the game, with Mahmudullah Riyad leading in T20Is and Mominul Haque in Tests.
Another agenda in BCB's meeting of the board of directors yesterday was to announce the names of the centrally contracted players this year. Mashrafe Bin Mortaza had already retracted his name from players to be centrally contracted and BCB had redacted Shakib Al Hasan from the list following his ban last year. Batsmen Imrul Kayes and Shadman Islam were excluded from the list of 16 players handed by the BCB while pacers Abu Hider, Khaled Ahmed, and Rubel Hossain also did not make the list.
Nazmul Hossain Shanto, Mohammad Mithun, Ebadot Hossain, Afif Hossain and opener Mohammad Naim got central contracts for the first time. Altogether, the central contracts consisted of four categories with the rookie category named as category D.
The BCB president also said that BCB's annual general meeting will take place in April this year. The T20 matches between the Asia XI and Rest of the World, slated for March 21 and 22 and a concert on March 18th -- both to mark the birth centenary of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman -- is set to take place as planned but will be dependent on the state of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
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