Batsmen's one more shot

The so far unimpressive national batsmen will get another chance to score some runs before next month's demanding tour of New Zealand as they will get to play the sixth round of the 9th National Cricket League that begins on Tuesday.
The national camp for the upcoming tour was scheduled to start from the same day but the authorities have revised it after new coach Jamie Siddons expressed his desire to watch the players in match conditions.
The 43-year-old Australian, who is in a two-year contract with the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) last month to become the eighth foreign coach in the country, arrive in Dhaka today to start his mission with a difficult first assignment.
"Now we have decided to start the training camp from the first week of December as Siddons has expressed his desire while talking with us today to watch the players in matches which he believes would be helpful to him," said chairman of the cricket operations committee Gazi Ashraf Hossain Lipu yesterday.
"The 15-member team for the one-day series would be selected before the start of the sixth round and those selected players can only play the longer-version game. Siddons is likely to watch the important match (between Khulna and Dhaka) in Khulna," he added.
The Rafiqul Alam-led three-member selection panel will submit the team, their first real test since being assigned, to the board during a meeting to be held on Monday before a final discussion with the new national coach.
It would be misleading for the Australian, who already has showed keen interest towards the structure and standard of the country's first-class cricket, if he considers one match rather than going through the last five rounds' performance of the Tigers batsmen, except Shakib Al Hasan who heads the leading run-scorers table with 401 runs in nine innings.
For the Melbourne-born coach, who had an outstanding first-class record, the main challenge would be to prove his worth as the head coach with a team struggling to perform consistently at top level, especially in the Test matches.
Instantly, he would get little encouragement as his probable batting line-up was completely out of sorts in the five rounds.
Among the regular national players only left-handed Shakib struck a hundred while national in-and out regulars Tushar Imran (168) and Alok Kapali (165) hit one each.
So one thing is for sure: the new coach has to find a way to overcome the permanent headache of the Tigers -- their brittle batting.