Patience is the key of Imrul’s success

In his four matches into the Bangladesh Premier League, Imrul Kayes’ batting average was only 12. While he failed to get off the mark in the first two games, he posted 13 and 24 in the next two.

When the tournament shifted to Chittagong, some analysts had already criticized him lot.

It wasn’t the start that Imrul had expected, especially after having scored two consecutive half-centuries against Zimbabwe in the ODI series which took place just before the BPL.

“Honestly speaking, it felt bad. I hadn’t done well in the last two BPLs either and I really wanted to play good cricket in this edition. I think the problem initially was that I was trying to hit every ball”, said Imrul.

“I used to think that I just had to score a boundary after every dot ball. That’s what my instincts told me,” Imrul told The Daily Star yesterday”, he added.

In Chittagong the left-hander decided to calm down and follow a different method to bat and score big. “The idea that I had to hit a boundary after every dot ball was something that I wanted to leave behind. I tried to play every ball to its merit. Instead of scoring a boundary after a dot ball, I looked for singles.”

Imrul even tried to use over-aggressive technique in his batting, but it didn’t work neither.”That over-aggressive technique didn’t work for me,” explained Imrul.

But at the last stages of the tournament Imrul has surprisingly came back and manged to score 300 runs in the competition and finished as the second highest run-scorer behind Kumar Sangakkara.

It was a tournament for Imrul to prove himself as a one day player. Since most of the people think he is the not fir for one day matches. Instead he should play test, they think.

“Before the competition began, there were former players and experts on talk shows who said that there were too many Test players in the Comilla side. By that of course some of them referred to me.”

“This feels really bad because the fact remains that I was the leading run-scorer for Bangladesh in the ODIs in one particular season. So I do have the ability to play the shorter formats and I have proved that,” stated Imrul.

During the 2015 World Cup Imrul was called after Anamul Haque had injured his shoulder. More recently, he replaced Soumya Sarkar in the last Zimbabwe series.

When asked if he felt he had a chance to make it to the national T20 side, he said: “I really don’t know. But I will hope for the best.”