Mohammad Salahuddin is arguably one of the finest coaches Bangladesh has produced so far despite the fact that he couldn’t win the BPL for the third consecutive time with Comilla Victorians. Salahuddin spoke at length regarding the challenges he faced as Victorians coach in an exclusive interview, from changing Towhid Hridoy’s batting order to give him freedom, his desire to be the head coach of Bangladesh T20I set-up someday and more.Here are the excerptsYou must be disappointed not to win the trophy (BPL)..
Yes but that is okay. In the next season we will give another try to be the champions.How did you reach the final on three occasions?I think we plan well so the team can reach top four. I think after reaching the top four we are ahead of others psychologically due to our foreign players. Big players playing in big games always help you. The most important thing is that during the league phase we don’t panic despite losing games. I always feel that in such a big tournament we will lose two or three games and even if we make mistakes in one game there is a chance to make a comeback. If we lose early it helps to identify where we lack and we try to fill that up. As the tournament progresses the boys got to gain confidence gradually because if there is lot of confidence initially and it decreases at the latter part of the tournament, then there is no point.Players kept arriving and leaving. How difficult was it for the Victorians in this season?This year it was very difficult and we struggled a lot though from outside it was hardly the case. Players who gave us commitment did not come but we were lucky despite all these things we got points in the group phase at that point of time.You worked with Aliss Al Islam’s action and he also got a call in the national set-up. Can you tell us about his journey and why he is bowling with a Sunil Narine action?It is unfortunate that he is ruled out of the Sri Lanka series due to a finger injury. He certainly has something in his bowling or else he couldn’t play for Comilla. If he can keep himself fit and if he is a bit more athletic he can be better. As far as his action is concerned it was changed totally because he was chucking with the previous action. He could do a lot of things before and my job was to make sure with the new action how he could bowl those deliveries that he mastered earlier. My main focus while changing anyone’s action is to make sure he can bowl what he could do earlier because except Razzak (former Bangladesh spinner) no one could bowl in the same manner with a modified action. Razzak bowled better with the new action because he learnt how to spin the ball and add flight variations.According to Victorians skipper Litton Kumar Das, you removed the insecurities from players’ minds that helped them improve.
