Bowlers Can Be Hunted, Batters Must Be Grown: The Question Nobody Asked After Nafees Spoke

I was sitting on a bench outside the indoor pavilion at Mirpur's Sher-e-Bangla, gimbal in hand and a folded notebook in my pocket. Inside, behind the nets, a line of teenage quicks drawn from nine venues was rehearsing run-ups—one with ice taped to his left shoulder, another correcting his side-on action on a coach's cue. A physio quietly checked a boy's elbow with a small tape measure. For forty-eight years I have watched this exact scene on Dhaka's cricket grounds, but today's note read differently. The board launched a 'Bowler Hunt' last month—a national search spread across nine venues with one stated aim: to find raw pace.

The press room was not full. No clamour, no flashbulbs. The man at the microphone was Shahriar Nafees, BCB Head of Cricket Operations—himself a former national-team opening batter. My old habit is to keep the recorder running and listen for the first ten minutes, to hear what is said and, more importantly, what is not. Today the silence was the loudest thing in the room.

Nafees's argument was simple, but an admission of asymmetry was buried inside it. He said bowlers are easy—pace is visible, measurable, so a teenager can be shortlisted within a few sessions. He invoked Imran Khan's Pakistan and the Caribbean pace batteries, the two most famous pace-production factories in cricket history. Batting, by contrast, is a different story: a batter is built innings by innings, over years. That argument is the centre of today's news.

Nafees himself was a top-order batter—a left-handed opener who once played big innings for the national side. Arriving in an administrative role, he now sees the structure through a player's eye. That background matters, because the man who knows the long grind of batting is the one saying a batter needs time. His words are not abstract theory; they carry the mark of experience.

One aspect slipped past most observers—the number of venues. Nine venues means a search spread from the spin city to border towns, beyond Dhaka. Analysts call this a scouting footprint, and this footprint helps reduce Dhaka-centric bias. In my experience, Bangladesh's talent was never born only in Mirpur; it was born in Sylhet's alleys, Khulna's fields, Rangpur's outfields. That nine-venue spread is a bigger signal than the paperwork.

And here a question arises that nobody asked at the conference. If the board scatters across nine venues to hunt bowlers, why is there no parallel programme to hunt batters? Nafees's answer was pre-shadowed—because a batter cannot be 'hunted', only 'grown'. The logic is fine on paper. But it simultaneously justifies a resource-allocation choice. Call the funded side 'hunting' and the unfunded side 'growing', and the debate stops, the accountability slips away.

An old lesson from my reporting life applies here. In 2026, when the Bangladesh Premier League was suspended, the silence of empty stadiums taught me that the sound of an empty gallery is a bigger truth than the record. I once filed a player agent's WhatsApp screenshot within two hours after matching it with three sources; that is when I learned a rumour is just noise until you find the heartbeat inside the paperwork. Today's conference is single-source too—Nafees is both the news and the explanation. Every sentence comes from one place. That is not a failure of his honesty; it is a question of a journalist's caution.

Let me untangle his argument. He says a pacer can be identified quickly because pace is a visible, measurable quality. True. But 'identified' and 'produced' are not the same thing—and that is the real crack. Talent identification and talent development are often confused, but in a high-performance pathway they are two separate stages. One is finding, the other is nurturing. Nafees himself said the measure of success is whether shortlisted players get domestic opportunities. In that single sentence he has admitted the limit of his own programme.

Shortlisting is not production. Picking ten from several hundred teenagers across nine venues is probably the easy job. The hard job starts afterwards—how many of those ten will bowl overs in domestic first-class cricket within two years, how many will bowl in national-team nets within four. Nobody gives that conversion figure, because giving it takes time, and time means patience. In my old phone notebook, most of the teenagers I once labelled 'future stars' across two decades are now forgotten. The reason is not a shortage of talent; it is a shortage of opportunity.

This is where Nafees's Imran-Caribbean example must be read carefully. Imran Khan's Pakistan or the West Indies pace battery was not built in a day. It was a culture built over decades—competition, domestic leagues, a fast-bowling reform. West Indian quicks once competed among themselves over who could bowl faster, who could throw the sharper bouncer. That competition built an ecosystem, not an event. Comparing a national scouting programme to that heritage lifts the expectation ceiling far too high—a place a single programme can never reach alone.

Now to pace itself. There is no two-opinion debate over Bangladesh cricket's weakest chapter—fast bowling. At home we lean on spin; away we lose matches through a lack of pace. To grasp pace's importance you have to look at the tour ledger. On Australian, South African or English pitches the ball bounces in stops and starts—leaning on spin there is hard, and pace decides the difference. So the board's pace hunt is really early preparation for future touring seasons. The only question is whether that preparation has arrived too soon, or exactly on time.

But the programme carries a risk nobody touched at the conference—excess load on teenage quicks. Stress fractures, side strains—these travel with haste. A teenager shortlisted and thrust into the media spotlight carries an expectation load on his shoulders, and that load sometimes comes back as overs. I have learned the best beat hides in the moment before the roar, not in the score—and that before-moment is exactly what is neglected here.

Success is measured by how many got opportunity, not by how fast they arrived. That is what I have learned from the field. Those built slowly last longer. A bowler who becomes a national title hero at eighteen often breaks down at thirty. History is cruel here, and a journalist's job is to remember that cruel arithmetic.

One more thing worth noticing: Nafees mentioned the inclusion of girls. Boys and girls were both shortlisted in the Bowler Hunt. That is no small news. Women's cricket in Bangladesh is advancing, if slowly, and if the search for pace spreads into the women's pathway, a whole new pipeline could form over the next decade. To my eye, a women's pace pipeline is a double gain—it lifts the standard of play and grows the audience market too. The conference, though, did not dwell on this.

On the domestic structure, one thing must be remembered. The Bangladesh Premier League and first-class cricket are the real testing labs for shortlisted pacers. A young pacer playing for a franchise builds confidence; a long first-class spell builds endurance. But in both arenas, the crush of overseas players and limited slots narrows the door for youngsters. Unless that narrow door opens, the Bowler Hunt's output will sit stuck on paper.

Still, the field reality must be kept in mind. Domestic cricket has limited room. How many pacers a side will field, how many overs each gets—that arithmetic is the real barrier. If only two of the ten shortlisted get regular domestic games, what happens to the other eight? Will their talent stay on paper? Nafees himself raised the question but did not answer it. There is no end to the search if the person found never gets to play. In Bangladesh's reality, domestic sides share a limited over-budget among pacers; giving a new teenager a chance means dropping someone older. Who takes that cut is the real politics.

For long years, sitting on Dhaka's grounds, I have noticed one thing. The talent was always there—in alley corners, village fields, Cox's Bazar clubs, Sylhet's small grounds. What was missing was the structure to hold that talent. A scouting programme is the first step; the second is domestic-league slots, coaching support, physios, nutrition—a complete path. If any single step on that path is empty, the rest is meaningless. So the Bowler Hunt must be judged on its network, not its name. In my spreadsheet I have opened a new column this year, titled: 'Where did they go after shortlisting'.

There was a restraint in Nafees's language that I respect. He made no false promise, no boast of 'a world-class pacer soon'. He said it is a long process, that patience is needed. That restraint is rare in Bangladesh's cricket administration. The moment an official speaks with lowered expectations is a good sign for a journalist, because over-promising always leads to collapse.

Now to the uncomfortable side buried inside this news. The report says the board is hunting bowlers. But nobody asked—then where do the batters come from? Nafees's logic is that a batter must be grown. Fine. But the machinery that 'growing' needs—age-group cricket, first-class opportunity, long-term coaching—is it fully running? The reality is that opportunities for batters in domestic cricket are also limited. If a young batter is not given enough innings this season, he cannot be 'grown'. Then the claim is incomplete. Look closely, and you see the board should have 'hunted' batters for the same reason it hunts bowlers—only the definition of hunting differs between the two.

Another thing. Investing in a pace pipeline is a big bet, because pace is the most injury-prone. If a country produces many pacers young, it must also take responsibility for their bodies. Nafees's remarks contain no mention of workload management. That silence is not small. Too many overs at a teenage age means a hospital bed at twenty-five. History offers countless examples—not just in Bangladesh, but worldwide. Where selection is for speed, preparation for injury is equally vital.

And there is the expectation trap. Imran Khan, the West Indies—uttering those names amounts to a kind of promise. Ordinary people will hear it and think a pace army will arrive within two or three years. But a pace culture is built over decades. If this gap is not made clear, then years later, when shortlisted teenagers fail to make the national side, the same people will say the programme failed. Yet the failure would not be the programme's—it would be the failure of patience. Here lies a journalist's duty—not to print numbers, but to make the arithmetic of time clear.

At the end of the conference I walked out through the Mirpur gate. Outside, in the afternoon light, a group of boys was playing tape-ball by the roadside—one ran in and bowled hard, and someone clapped. I stopped for a moment. After the final whistle, I stay in the tunnel where the real rhythm is still fading. This scene is the real starting point. The ones the board is hunting are right here. The question is not only about searching; it is about what we do after we find them.

The domestic scorecards of the coming season will stay in my sight. How many of the shortlisted names take the field, how many overs or innings they get—that arithmetic will reveal whether the Bowler Hunt was an event or the beginning of a system. And on a page of my notebook I wrote today's date, with one question beside it: when is the Batter Hunt?