Mahmudullah Riyad: The most undramatic hero of Bangladesh cricket?

[Rinathq]

The title says it all. In the age of all kinds of drama and controversy, we have a player who has never attracted our dramatic media for any sort of issues. Even though his achievements are nothing remarkable, the fact that he has stayed away from every drama after playing for almost 15 years is kind of remarkable. Riyad has been moved around all over the place wherever the team needed or wherever the selectors failed to find someone else.

Riyad started his career as an off spin allrounder who was known for his ability to prevent a collapse. His batting style suited the longer format more due to his calm and steady approach. He was praised by a lot of senior crickers around the world for his matured approach. However, with the team lacking firepower, Riyad had to adapt to a more attacking brand of cricket. Even after he started his transformation as a middle order batsman, Riyad was asked to bat up the order during the 2015 World cup where he was nothing short of spectacular. But maybe it was his quiet, resigning nature that allowed the think tank to change his role again and shifted him down the order. Today, he plays a role which doesn’t have any easy days. Either he comes in to stop a collapse with the team losing early wickets or he walks in when the team needs rapid acceleration because of a steady start. Yet for someone who the team relies on for a rescuer role so frequently, when the leadership spot opened, it did not go to him despite his experience as a successful leader across all formats in the domestics. It went to someone who until they got the role had no interest for it. Riyad has been a captain in various situations whenever the think tank had dramas with our other big 3 stars. But when everything got resolved, that’s when Riyad’s glory days came to an end.

Recently, Riyad was dropped from the test side and for right measures since we desperately need a change in our worst format. Even though Riyad hasn’t been a terrible option for the longer format, he was never an ideal one since he changed his batting style. But the way he was dropped and asked to focus on two other format is questionable. You don’t see the think tank dropping Tamim Iqbal from the T20 format and asking him to focus on other formats of the game. Even though Tamim has been a weak link for a while now and the team has options to replace him. But again, It’s Tamim Iqbal Khan we are talking about not Mahmudullah Riyad. The think tank also never managed to drop Mushfiqur Rahim from his keeping role despite his abysmal performance in such a crucial role. They definitely tried but decided to gave in to his preference. I wonder how someone like Mahmudullah must have felt when he saw someone like Mithun Ali in the squad but not someone like him who actually lead the side not too long ago.

But that’s where he is remarkably better then the rest of the senior players. He doesn’t complain and accepts whatever the think tank has in the notebooks for him. He has never complained about batting lower to make way for far less talented cricketers like Mithun, Kayes, Soumya, Sabbir even though he has always favored batting up and he won’t complain now when he has to make way for more experiments.

In the end, Mahmudullah Riyad will end his career as a very average cricketer on statistics but possibly one of the best in the country in every other merit. As a fan, I thank him for not being a controversy king or a social media sensation or a crybaby against the media. Thank you for being Mahmudullah Riyad!