Trevor Chappell is no stranger to Sri Lanka after two six-month stints as
the fielding coach and he hopes that his inexperienced players will not just
learn from the cricket that commences on Thursday, but also from Sri Lanka's
experience as an emerging cricket nation.
Sri Lanka were given Test status in 1981, but only won their first Test when
Duleep Mendis's side defeated India in 1985/6. They had to wait even longer
for their first overseas victory, which did not come until 1994/5 against
New Zealand.
"The players can learn from the example of Sri Lanka and I would like some of the recently retired cricketers here, like Arjuna Ranatunga and Roy Dias, to talk to the players about their early day experiences," said Chappell
"Aravinda de Silva was in Dhaka just before we left for Zimbabwe and he
chatted to the players, telling them that they may have problems to start
with but must just preserver because, although this generation may not break
through, the combined knowledge gets passed on.
"At the moment there is no Bangladesh Test player for them to turn to for
advice, so talking some of the old Sri Lankan players may help to short cut
the learning curve or, at least, give them more background, which helps them
realise that they are not the first ones to have gone through this tough
process."
Chappell remains optimistic, however, that despite lacking a first class
cricket structure and proper development programme until recently Bangladesh
can break through quickly into the big time.
"The talent is there," he says.
"There are 140 million people who are fanatical about their cricket, so its
matter of putting the right development programmes in place to identify the
players and then coach them in the correct manner.
"I am very confident that sometime along the line, in 5 or 10 years,
Bangladesh will be a pretty strong Test side.
"I am looking for the guys to learn how to play at this level.
"They haven't played a lot of first class cricket in Bangladesh, let alone
Test cricket, so it's a big jump to come and play countries like Pakistan
and Sri Lanka in Test matches.
"We played Zimbabwe earlier in the year and learnt a bit from playing them,
but we weren't able to put it into practice against Pakistan.
"There was no reason for it, as the wicket was ideal and batting is
generally recognised as one of our strengths.
"We need to learn how to play session cricket and then how to play for five
days, where we play consistently well throughout and don't have bad hours
when we get thoroughly beaten.
"We regularly lose wickets just before the end of the session or drinks, but
we need the guys to bat throughout a session, even if they don't score many
runs.
"With the bowling we have just tried to keep to a simple plan of bowling
line and length.
"There is no point in anything too fancy at the moment. We can look a more
complex plans of attack in the future."