Field of dreams

About 45 kilometres from Dhaka city centre lies 100 acres of utopia, the Bangladesh Kreeda Shiksha Protishthan (BKSP), or the Bangladesh Sports Institute. It covers most popular sports but its biggest claim to fame, which fits in neatly with the job at hand, is its grooming of cricketers. The cricket revolution here is young yet the BKSP has already given four players to the current national side: Shakib Al Hasan, still on the rolls here, Abdur Razzak, Shahadat Hossain, and Mushfiqur Rahim.

The BKSP is a place that appeals to the inner child – it is everything a sports-mad kid would have fantasised about in school, and missed out on because of the focus on studies. The whole campus has the typical smell of a playing: there's sweat, there's disappointment, and lots of unbridled joy. A swimming meet is going on, the road leading to the swimming pool and the football ground has Brazil written on it. Also going on is a training programme for Level 1 coaches; watching it even from a distance is an education in itself. And it's only 10am, and the students are only studying.

As the words kreeda [sport] and shiksha [education] in the name suggest, the institute focuses on both in equal proportion – though hopefully only on paper, as it would be a shame for such institutions (rare as they are on the subcontinent) to go on too much about studies. Instead, better to focus on the excellent facilities to play and train for cricket, football, hockey, tennis, swimming events, athletics, and basketball. The school starts from class seven with students admitted after a two-stage testing procedure: a written exam and then a test in the discipline they have chosen. The sports exam, including tests of skill, physical fitness and aptitude, is conducted by an expert. For example, if the candidate is a bowler, he may be tested by Dipu Roy Chowdhury, a former bowler and 'A' team coach and now a certified coaches' educator.

The cricket facility works in tandem with the National Cricket Academy (NCA), which is yet to completely move in to the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium in Mirpur. The U-19 teams also come and train here. The training facilities are open to all Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) teams. The regular students get the services of specialist batting, bowling, and fielding coaches.

A typical day here starts at 5:30am. After a two-hour assembly and physical training session, the students go back to the hostel, shower, have breakfast, and go to their classes. The training for the games happens in the evenings. The best part here is a student has to pay only 3,500 Takas every three months, a pittance compared to what former players, not qualified as coaches, charge at their academies in Indian metros.

Eddie Barlow, the former Bangladesh coach, was particularly fond of this place. "He used to tell us he would be here only for so much time, we needed to develop coaches," Chowdhary says. "All this development has happened so rapidly because we were under pressure, because we were being criticised after being given Test status. It was up to us to develop and prove them wrong." They now have 150 homegrown Level 1 coaches now, and foreign coaches looking forward to take charge of the national side too.

After Barlow's death, Cally, his widow, had expressed a desire to have his ashes spread over the BKSP, he loved the place so much. From the evidence at hand, it’s a sentiment fully justified.