Old faces star in long NCL

The National Cricket League (NCL), one of the two four-day domestic cricket competitions in Bangladesh, whizzed by this season almost unnoticed. And the reason behind that was that this competition was scheduled at a time when the Bangladesh Cricket Board was involved in more attractive series.

For starters there was the Afghanistan series and that was immediately followed by the England series. While some of the national players did play the initial rounds of the NCL, a majority of them were busy with the international games.

After the England series came the Bangladesh Premier League, the country's premier T20 competition, and the NCL was stopped for a month-and-a-half. Upon its resumption it once again missed the players from the national team since they were all getting ready for the New Zealand series in a camp in Sydney. In fact, most of the NCL's final leg was overshadowed by the national team's performance in New Zealand.

However, in the midst of all this, there were a few fine performances. The batting card was ruled by former national players with Alok Kapali topping the runs column with 598 runs from six matches. The batsman of the tournament though was Tushar Imran, who scored 518 runs at an average of 86.33, finishing the tournament with three centuries in his last three games.

Pacer Abu Jayed capped off a fine season by scalping 29 wickets and finishing in pole position in the NCL. Aside from doing well in the NCL, Jayed also proved to be quite handy for the Dhaka Dynamites as well.

Al-Amin Hossain, who scalped a six-wicket haul in his last game to help Khulna retain the championship, put on a good show with 23 wickets in just four matches.