Bangladesh are all set to introduce greenhouse wickets at the National Cricket Academy in Mirpur this year in order to give its cricketers ample practice facilities during the monsoon season.
Greenhouse wickets have recently been introduced by New Zealand and Australia so that their players can train without any hassle during the rainy season.
Bangladesh players often face a similar problem during that part of the year as there is a lack of practice wickets in the country and many have to sit idle for the shortage of practice wickets.
A Bangladesh Cricket Board official on Wednesday said that they are expecting to have 20 greenhouse wickets by this June at the NCA which will reduce cricketers’ practice worries to a large extent.
“We are introducing this type of wickets at the NCA in Mirpur and it’s a big project. It will cover up 20 wickets in total at the North and South areas of the venue. Players can practice at these 20 natural turf wickets during the whole monsoon season. Hopefully, it will be established by this June,” BCB Grounds Committee Chairman Mahbubul Anam told reporters in Mirpur.
“We are working on several projects and you can’t notice it quickly. I think our practice worries and lack of ground problems will be reduced to a large number in the next six months to one year.
“We are now in the buying process. Hopefully, the materials will arrive by April. We may launch it by May-June. If we can use it in this monsoon season, we will understand how much benefit it will provide us…A total of Tk three to 3.5 crore is likely to be spent on this project. The main benefit is we can practice in the heavy monsoon as well,” he added.
Meanwhile, Mahbubul expressed his satisfaction at the batting performances of the young batters in the ongoing Bangladesh Premier League 2023 and he believed that it would help Bangladesh cricket as well.
“There are some young batsmen who are doing excellent (in the BPL) and I feel that the future of Bangladesh cricket is very bright and I’m really feeling happy for that,” he said, adding that scoring a good amount of runs mostly depended on batsmen’s performance, not on wickets.
This year in BPL, all three venues – Dhaka, Chattogram and Sylhet – provided good wickets unlike in the past and there were several instances when teams went past the 200-run mark and even the opposite teams chased the target or came closer to the total. Teams have gone past the 200-run mark five times while in the 32 matches played so far, teams scored 160 or beyond 30 times in this year’s BPL.
“See scoring runs depends on batters, not on the wickets and I’m telling this again and again…I think the battle between the wicket and the bat is really important and finally either the bat will win or the win,” he concluded.
