[Eshen]

Wasim Jaffer takes charge of HP team

Wasim Jaffer, the newly appointed batting coach for High Performance (HP) Unit, arrived in Dhaka to take the charge as he is expected to help the batsmen honing their skill.

The former Indian opener will train Bangladesh batsmen in the U-19s, the A team and also the senior side.

For Jaffer, this will be his first international coaching assignment.

The veteran opener, who played 31 Tests (five hundreds and 11 fifties) and two ODIs for India, came to the national academy premises on Sunday and got introduced with his charges.

The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) is currently running the four-month residential camp of HP unit to provide the players an opportunity to be in cricket continuously.

“We will use his expertise as per our requirements,” BCB game development chairman Abu Emam Mohammed Kawsar said.

Jaffer accepted the offer after being approached for the job by BCB. The 41-year-old was in Bangladesh for a couple of weeks to play in the Dhaka Premier League for Abahani Limited.

On that trip, the BCB officials were impressed upon seeing the seasoned campaigner at the nets. Recently, a few net sessions with the Mumbai run-machine helped Bangladesh batsman Soumya Sarkar score a hundred and a double-hundred in the DPL, Bangladesh’s premier one-day competition.

“I have seen his (Wasim) batting very closely. He is a very good and experienced player. He has scored 40,000 runs in his career. Since he scored such amount of runs, so he definitely has the quality,” Soumya said earlier.

Revealing how he picked Jaffer’s brains, Soumya said: “I have understood how he thinks in the field and outside the field. I also follow his way of batting. I talked with him about this, nothing more than that and just tried to follow his instructions.”