Aminul Islam's new horizons

As one national team prepares to take its leave of Bangladesh, another has flown in to take its place. But the 40-member squad that arrived in Dhaka on Tuesday evening was of a distinctly different profile to that of England’s cricketers. The Chinese women’s squad and their Under-19 counterparts are at the start of a month-long training tour, as they prepare to make their bow at the Asian Games in November.

The visit is part of an Asian Cricket Council initiative to spread the game into new territories in the region, and the Chinese men’s squad is already back home after their own visit earlier in the year. It is a reminder that Bangladesh, while still finding their feet at the very highest level of the game, are already a cut above the competition when you travel east of India.

There is a familiar figure at the forefront of the project to promote cricket in the region, a man who Bangladesh might one day do well to reclaim as their own. Aminul Islam achieved instant fame in November 2000 when he scored a century in his country’s inaugural Test, but for the past two-and-a-half years he has been working as one of three development officers at the ACC, with a brief to oversee six of the 18 countries in the region - Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand ... and the big one.

“We are putting extra effort into China, because without China, cricket is not a global sport,” Aminul told Cricinfo. “It is a very special project. When I started out, they didn’t have any facilities or experience, because cricket is very much an English game with complicated rules and customs, but since I’ve been involved we have introduced the sport to 101 schools, and with help from the ACC and Cricket Australia, we have trained more than 100 Level One coaches.”

Aminul is almost certainly the only Test cricketer to speak fluent Chinese, but he sincerely hopes he won’t be the last. With a population of over 1.3 billion, the possibilities are endless if China chooses to latch onto a sport that appeals to strategic thinkers as well as pure athletes. “If China walks at the pace of other countries, the gap will always remain the same,” said Aminul. “But if they choose to run, within five or seven years’ time, they will be an exciting team.

“They may not know about cricket, but they are skilled in other areas,” he added. “For example, the country has 20 biomechanical laboratories, and they recently took the data from a series of tests on Australia’s elite players, and compared them to their local players.” The man behind that project was a certain Professor Liu, a Level Two coach and umpire, and the author of one of China’s first cricket books.

There is a certain irony about Aminul’s role – he is an experienced Bangladeshi cricketer exporting his knowledge to a less-well-versed nation, while his own country imports foreign coaches to take their own game to the next level. But in that regard, Aminul has taken on board the philosophy of his former coach, Bangladesh’s original director of development, Eddie Barlow, who always saw himself as a caretaker boss until there was sufficient homegrown expertise to take over.

“Imported coaches are important,” said Aminul. “They know the game better, and they have more technical skills. But cricket is a high-speed ball-game and also a mental game, so it is impossible to try to explain it fully in the wrong language. In Bangladesh, I believe that the time has come, after 11 years, for us to find a local leader, a local soldier, to take the team to the next level.”

The contrasts between Bangladesh and China are vast, but where cricket is concerned there could be scope for a mutually beneficial arrangement. On the one hand, Bangladesh is a poor country brimful of enthusiasm, on the other, China is limitlessly rich, but as yet unaware of the sport’s possibilities.

Right now, the Chinese training camp is taking place at the Spartan environs of Bangladesh’s national academy, the BKSP in Savar, but who knows, in a few years’ time, maybe such events will take place at state-of-the-art facilities at China’s headquarters in Shenyang, or maybe even Dhaka or Chittagong. After all, it was Chinese money that funded most of the redevelopment ahead of the 2007 World Cup.

Although he remains committed to his ACC role at least until the end of the Asian Games, Aminul is open to the possibility of a return to his home country, where his experience in development would doubtless prove invaluable as Bangladesh seeks to solidify the structures that have been developing, all too slowly in some cases, since they rose to Test status a decade ago.

“The No. 1 thing that Bangladesh cricket needs is a solid plan to use the 150 million people who remain unexplored,” he said. “We need a concrete plan, to increase the limited control that we currently have, and we need to create a strong pipeline, to improve our insubstantial foundations. I am a son of Bangladesh, so if I received a good and responsible call, I would think about coming back. My country has given me so much.”