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Our time will come

QUAZI ZULQUARNAIN ISLAM
For a few fleeting hours in Grenada, Captain Shakib Al Hasan may well have been the doppelganger of Captain Jack Sparrow, the charismatic, happy-go-lucky pirate from the Disney movie. Impetuous, sharp and overall just scratch-your-head-pump-your-fist brilliant, Shakib revelled in the role of captain and truly established himself as the Pirate of the Caribbean.
But if Shakib played with the ease, class and nonchalance of a pirate captain navigating favored seas, Rokibul proved the perfect foil. He was an able first mate to Shakib and negotiated calmly the stormy weather Bangladesh faced at 67-4 in the second innings. It may be easy to forget but the young Rokibul was the second highest scorer in both innings and was as important to the second Test victory as his more illustrious counterpart.
And so the celebrations overtake us. Sweets are exchanged, backs slapped and a first-ever series victory, no, a first-ever series whitewash is celebrated with
the enthusiasm it deserves.
However, as any good lawyer will tell you: read the fine print. And the fine print is this that despite our wonderful victory, which we shall savour till time out of mind, it was achieved against a side missing all of its stars and most of its reserves. Stripped of jargon, this was a Test win against a rag tag bunch of replacements full of washed-up pro's and rising upstarts.
Not that it should take away anything from Shakib and Rokibul's wonderful rearguard, or from Tamim Iqbal's superb century in the first Test. In the end, the Tigers could only face what was put in front of them, right?
So the key question is, how exactly did they tackle the challenge they had been served? It is in answering this question that our saccharine sweet happiness begins to crumble. While the Tigers came out top in almost all duels in the Test match, they did so against an opposition which was inexperienced, unprepared and, most importantly, much poorer in overall quality than the Bangladesh team. Collectively it was more of a first class opponent than aTest one. It is not a situation often replicated. TheTigers had everything to lose, and very little to gain. A loss would only give more voice to the
critics. But Shakib and company adjusted very well to the tag of favourites, the loss of original captain Mashrafee and subsequently an attack shorn of its most potent force.
But a key variable in every equation is the opponent and this was as poor a "Test opponent” as the Tigers will ever face Even the rampantly declining (original) West Indies side would have been a massive improvement over this lot and provided the Tigers with a much sterner challenge. Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnarcsh Sarwan would handle the spinners better. Chris Gayle would definitely launch a few and Fidel Edwards and Darren Powell would have been at least a bit sharper than the underrated Roach. How would we have done then?
That is a question that looks set to be answered in the ODI series from Sunday. Till then, while we can still savour the joy of this remarkable achievement, let us not get carried away in our euphoria. Let us call a spade a spade and agree that this really provides no marker for our overall development in the grand scheme of things. It is an outlier, and if only for the sake of maintaining realistic expectations we should agree not to be “ irrationally exuberant".
Our time will come definitely. This is a stepping-stone towards that goal.