Mohammad Salahuddin, Bangladesh men’s team head coach at the upcoming Asian Games cricket event in Japan, backed Najmul Hossain Shanto to deliver in the shorter format.
The former T20 skipper, who last played a T20I in May 2025 against the UAE in Sharjah, is back in the squad after more than a year as he was dropped from the squad last year following a poor run of form.
Salahuddin insisted that Najmul is capable of proving his worth in the shorter format.
“Look, Bangladesh’s top 15 players will play. Who came in and who didn’t — that’s not really the big issue. The issue is whether our top 15 are playing. I think everyone agrees that Shanto (Najmul) is among those top 15. So that’s why he has been selected,” said Salahuddin.
“Regarding Shanto, I’ll say he’s not a new T20 player. And the last time he played T20, he didn’t perform poorly either. He has quite a few centuries — quite a few centuries in the BPL. I think he’ll have no problem adjusting to this format,” Salauddin concluded.
Salahuddin added that initially they planned to send the High Performance Unit members for the Asian Games but changed their mind after their opponents named strong squads. “Look what I will say is that initially we were supposed to go with HP team. But when we see that other countries are also sending their entire national teams, why don’t we send them there? So we think it will be a challenging series and in the group we have, I think we have a very easy option to go to the final if we play well,” said Salahuddin adding that adjusting to the shorter format will be key for their success.
“But for the last few series we haven’t been playing T20s. The big challenge is to adapt to it as soon as we can and how quickly we can bring back the rhythm of T20s to the rhythm we were in the last three-four years ago. Since we were playing Tests and ODIs, we haven’t played T20s for the last few months,” he concluded.
Salahuddin added that they will be looking to take information from the women’s team regarding the conditions in Japan considering they will be playing ahead of them. “There is an advantage since the girls will play first, we might get a lot of information from the girls about what the wicket will be like, what the field will be like. Because since the girls are going first, when the girls’ game is over, the boys will go. We might get a lot of information before that,” he concluded.
Bangladesh’s campaign at the Asian Games kickstarts in the quarterfinal stage on September 29, as one of four seeded teams – India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka being the others – to secure a direct entry to the quarterfinals.
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