Sabbir Rahman is back in the colours of the Bangladesh National team after 3 years. This time there’s actually a lot of hope, optimism and expectations because of his profile in T20Is along with the miserable display by Bangladesh in this format.
However, there were a few eyebrows raised with his inclusion. Nobody can say the doubters are wrong. However, eyebrows should have been raised the last time as well, when he was dropped from the team.
There was no definite reason to drop him then, neither to include him now. Let’s try to remember what happened almost 3 years ago.
As already mentioned, Sabbir Rahman last played for Bangladesh back in July of 2019 against Sri Lanka. It was a miserable series for the whole team. Sabbir Rahman didn’t do well either but did score a half-century (60 off 56) in the first game.
The assignment before that was the World Cup. He played two matches there and against India, he scored 36(36) which really kept Bangladesh alive for the semi-finals at that moment.
Before that, in the historic tri-nation series, Sabbir couldn’t and didn’t have to do much. Against New Zealand, he got his maiden ODI hundred and was the highest scorer for Bangladesh in that series.
Overall, in the last 1 year of his representing the national team, he scored 306 runs in 13 innings, including a century and a half-century, with an average of 25.5. Before you judge the average, he played in No. 06 or 07 every time except once.
If we talk about T20, his last 13 innings brought together a total of 212 runs. It should be mentioned that these 13 innings were not at a stretch. He was on and off the team this whole time.
These numbers might not look good enough. But they are surely not as bad as to drop someone from the team that lacks consistency as a whole.
Now that he is back on the team, let’s look at his recent stats in domestic cricket.
Sabbir scored 515 runs in this DPL. Considering there were 6 players who scored more than 600 runs, this is not impressive by any means. He only had 1 century and 1 half-century in the whole tournament.
In the latest BPL, he managed to score only 109 runs from 6 innings before being dropped. In DPL2021, which was played in a T20 format, he scored only 229 runs in 14 innings without any 50+ scores.
It clearly shows that Sabbir Rahman has not done anything significant since he was dropped to be included in the national squad. Yet, Bangladesh are off to Asia Cup T20 tournament with him.
In this whole process, Sabbir’s inclusion is not what we look at. It’s mindless decisions made by BCB–without any proper vision, that we need to scrutiny.
Clearly, there Sabbir wasn’t a strong contender to be dropped, and neither he is now a contender to be included. Then why all this? Is it social media trolls that showed him the exit door in the first place, and is bringing him back now?
