Anamul Haque arrived at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium on the 7th of August wearing a white shirt and ash-colored pants to pick up his jersey. He was nominated for the Bangladesh Tigers camp, a board-initiated development program that works with cricketers being considered for the national team.
It was a surprising appearance given that he had been excluded from the national team following the home series against India, in which he scored 14, 11, and 8 runs before being dismissed.
Anamul was not selected for the Asia Cup preliminary squad of 32 players, nor was he included among the three Asia Cup reserves. In addition, he was not included in the BCB’s and Chandika Hathurusingha’s World Cup reserve squads.
Tamim Iqbal, Taijul Islam, Saif Hassan, Mosaddek Hossain, Tanzim Hasan Sakib, Khaled Ahmed, Mahmudullah, and Zakir Hasan were included in the squad; however, Anamul did not make the cut for the reserve squad. As a substitution for the injured Litton Das, he is scheduled to proceed to Sri Lanka for the Asia Cup on Wednesday afternoon.
After Litton failed to join the squad when they left Dhaka for the Asia Cup, national selectors stated they were considering sending Saif Hasan, but ultimately decided against it due to his health problems. Later, Zakir was brought up as a potential replacement for Litton. The selectors, however, claimed that they were unwilling to dispatch a replacement and wanted to wait until the last minute for Litton to recover before settling on Anamul, who had never been a consideration.
On Wednesday, BCB national chief selector Minhajul Abedin stated that they required a wicketkeeper-opener and therefore chose Anamul. However, they did not explain why they did not consider Zakir, who is also a wicketkeeper-batsman.
Following the ODI series against Ireland, the BCB selection committee allegedly lost faith in wicketkeeper-opener Rony Talukdar and therefore did not select him. If Anamul was selected to maintain the right-left hand combination, Rony would consider himself unfortunate, as he filled the same function and was included in the 32-man Asia Cup preliminary squad.
According to Minhajul, they constantly monitored Anamul and enrolled him in the Tigers program. Following his exploits with the bat (in the Dhaka Premier League for Abahani Limited, in which he amassed 834 runs in 16 matches with an average of 59.57 and a strike rate of 97.7, including three centuries), he was chosen for the Asia Cup.
However, Minhajul attempted to support the decision of the selection committee, which included Habibul Bashar and Abdur Razak.
“Why do you think he was nowhere?” asked Minhajul.
“We kept him in the Tigers program and don’t you think that it is a part of us? In the past, didn’t we pick cricketers from the High-Performance Unit?
“We didn’t pick Zakir as we needed a right-handed opener who can keep wickets,” he said, though did not want to answer why they did not prefer Rony Talukdar.
