Last Updated on 4 years by Charbel Coorey
Bangladesh High Performance Unit head coach Toby Radford aims to rebuild better Test players | Toby Radford wants Bangladesh to do well away from home
Bangladesh has appointed High-Performance Unit head coach Toby Radford to work towards further developing Test cricket of the nation. The year-old agreement, that began in August after the resignation of Simon Helmut, is focusing on bringing young players on board to play red-call cricket more often.
“If you look at the best players in world cricket like Kane Williamson, Virat Kohli, Ben Stokes and Steve Smith, they are all good in all formats,” says Ranford. “They are all good Test players. They have a good basic technique, and once you have that, you can then develop the funky T20 stuff. I am working on them having a good, solid technique first. Let’s get the chassis of the car built before we get the alloys. I’d like to see Bangladesh be really competitive in Tests, but not just in Bangladesh,” he reported to Cricbuzz.
The former West Indies assistant and batting coach saw the team collapse in one of the Test matches during their last West Indies tour in just two days. The pace of Shannon Gabriel, Kemar Roach and the rest of the fast bowlers blew away Bangladesh’s top-order. Then we saw a very different Bangladesh side with the white-ball formats. They won both the ODIs and T20Is. “I have told the board that I want to create a group of players that can really stand up in Test cricket. They can be technically tight, face 90 miles an hour and bat for five hours. They can bowl in long spells”, the newly appointed coach said.
The head coach has also pointed out that the country’s young player plays a lot of T20 matches compared to long-form cricket. “But I don’t want to create just T20 players, but top-end Test cricketers who can then play T20 and 50-over cricket,” said the coach. “In my view, Test players are the best players in world cricket. I don’t mind these young players in the tournament but I want them to have a really good game that holds up in red-ball, five-day game anywhere in the world”, he added.
Written by Anjali Jha. Follow Anjali on Twitter today.
