Cricket is a funny game. A hundred or five wickets will see a regular player turn hero overnight while the same player sometimes also loses his place from the team for inconsistent performance. Therefore, it is easy to figure that consistency is what the cricketers look for day in day out.
For Bangladesh, they have been looking for it in players and as a team for the past 14 years in Test cricket and have they found it yet? The Tigers staged excellent teamwork to earn their maiden home clean sweep of a Test series recently while as an individual Mominul Haque can be stated as the solution to the impatient batsmen.
One can hardly find a 23-year-old so calm and down to earth like the left-handed Mominul who has already made a place alongside the top players of the game. He became Bangladesh’s fastest to reach 1000 Test runs (21 innings) while his 131 in the last innings in Chittagong took his average to 63.05 and put him second to the legendary Sir Donald Bradman who averaged 99.94.
“Please don’t mention all this. I don’t like talking of records or what I have done. These things embarrass me,” said Mominul to Dhaka Tribune over phone. “I just want to carry on with my job which is to bat.”
His 55 on debut against Sri Lanka was overshadowed by Mushfiqur Rahim’s 200, Mohammad Ashraful’s 190 and Nasir Hossain’s 100 in the same innings. Apart from his personal third match against Zimbabwe, where he scored 23 and 29, he managed a fifty in all his other Tests and now stands with 1198 runs from 12 matches.
So what motivates Mominul, a person who has been scoring runs heavily even when people around him were not. “Batsmen from other countries motivate me,” said Mominul who also realises nothing is invincible.
“Me, Tamim bhai and Anamul often discuss in the dressing room of how the batsmen from the leading cricket nations score a hundred in every second game and their consistency. This gives me itchy feelings to perform and the believe that I can also do the same.
“And today cricket has reached a point where a batsman cannot survive scoring even half centuries, people – let it be the team or general spectators – all wants to see more from a batsman and I try to meet the demand,” said Mominul.
However, converting the fifties to hundred is not a habit that Mominul has grown yet and the player from Cox’s Bazar is also concerned about the fact. “My mindset is to be blamed, not my technique.”
“We (Him and the national coaching staff) tried to find the mistakes I am doing. We couldn’t find anything wrong with my technique. The fault is with my mentality. I am working on it and hope it will be put right soon,” Mominul concluded.
