Bangladesh will vie to defend their ACC U-19 Asia Cup, scheduled to be held in the UAE from November 29, which will be the first big test of the current batch of the young Tigers.
The U-19 boys recently had a successful outing against their UAE counterparts, winning the lone three-day match and one-day series at home quite dominantly. Bangladesh U-19 team coach Naveed Nawaz, who had guided the 2020 batch to World Cup success.
His main target is to understand the brand of cricket we want to play and the challenges we will be getting in the future. We have been training with this group since July. We have to foresee the problems that we will face in the future and we were focused on finding answers. Things like how do we want to play spin, play pace, how we want to control our batting, what are the key aspects of bowling that we are looking at and combination of the team. We are working on these things and the boys are also responding pretty well.
Obviously, the opposition wasn't really strong but I'm sure when we go to the Asia Cup and play Sri Lanka in December, we are going to face much tougher opposition. But it's important for our players to understand how they want to approach the game and what kind of cricket they want to play. They should bring the same thing in the middle from their practice so that they can learn in every outing and you must be getting betters. And that's the idea.
All of them were given clear roles to play. We are trying to make them understand what role they are playing in the team, what us expected from them and how do they go about doing that. I'm not looking at purely on performances. We saw a lot of good performances, like our fast bowlers did really well in the three-day game and when we came back to Mirpur, we saw our spinners doing well. And of course, the batsmen – Zawad, Rifat, Tamim and Aleen – have been scoring runs. There were some useful performances from the late order as well. But you have to get better and you have to have a better understanding of the game so that you can do the same thing against the tough opponents.
