'My doctor has told me to stay away from cricket'

The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) president Nazmul Hassan has indicated on Thursday that he may not contest the upcoming BCB elections. After the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the BCB, Hassan said that his doctor has advised him to stay away from cricket.

"My doctor has told me to stay away," said the BCB President. "He has told me not to get involved in cricketing affairs even if I remain in charge of the board. I absolutely hate it when Bangladesh lose a game. I become absolutely furious when we lose. Even my family members don't want to bother me at that time."

Hassan, who has been the chief patron of the highest cricketing body of the country since 2012, said that the date of the BCB elections would be announced soon. "We'll decide on the election on September 1 in the board meeting. We'll soon announce the date of the election," said the BCB president. 

Hassan mentioned that Covid-19 affected the plans of the BCB big time. "We should've developed more quality players by now. But we've done pretty well. We had a lot of plans involving the U-19 players but Covid-19 has halted them."

"The World Cup winning side played 30 competitive matches ahead of the 2020 U-19 World Cup. But we couldn't arrange it this time around because of Covid-19. Also, we couldn't provide the World Cup winning players with sufficient facilities. Right now the women's team doesn't have a coach. That's how negative the effects of Covid-19 have been," he added.

BCB has been planning to decentralise cricket from Dhaka and it has made good progress. "We had planned to launch regional cricket associations and even started off proceedings in Chattogram and Sylhet. But we've failed to create full-fledged cricket associations. We'll subsequently expand this programme up to district level," Nazmul Hassan concluded.