‘I will try to slow things down’

Allan Donald, nicknamed the White Lightning during his playing days, will guide the Bangladesh pacers in the upcoming T20 World Cup in Australia. Before the South African joined the team in New Zealand, The Business Post’s Shams Rahman caught up with him for a chat, where the former pacer spoke about his plans for Bangladesh’s death bowling woes and how impressed he has been with the pacers. Here is the first of the two-part interview

How has your experience in Bangladesh been so far?

Donald: It’s been fantastic. I have really enjoyed it. The first thing that I realised was that working here will not be like working in Australia, South Africa, or England, where there are young kids knowing exactly what their game is, understanding what they are about, tactically and strategically.

This (working with Bangladesh) was always going to be a project for me. I call it a project because there are some exciting young fast bowlers that needed just a bit of guidance and leadership. I think in the 6-7 months I have been with the team; we have started to make some steady progress and I’m slowly seeing some improvement. And I mean slowly. It was never going to be that I walked into the dressing room and fixed things in six weeks.

For me, it was going to be a project where I have to take small steps. And at times, there is a language barrier. But I think it’s been steady progress, especially in Test cricket. The white-ball cricket is always going to be a bit of a hit-and-miss. But we are getting there.

Talking about raw talents, how impressed have you been with them?

Donald: I have been very impressed. You can only say so much and try to implement different strategies and tactics, but players must start to understand and test it out to see if it works. I’m thinking more about Test cricket at this stage.

Of late, in the last 6-8 weeks, we have seen the white-ball squad taking a more aggressive route. I have seen the results of hunting batsmen down. So, from a white-ball strategy, it is starting to show that it is okay to be hit for a six or a top edge or so, but we don’t stop hunting them down and I think that has been fantastic. And from a Test match point of view as well, the understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and not be afraid of taking it on.

I think there’s a nice bulk of young pacers starting to show their teeth. I have been very impressed by Hasan Mahmud, Ebadot Hossain, and Khaled Ahmed. The whole bunch of guys- Shoriful (Islam), Taskin (Ahmed), Mustafizur (Rahman) is good, and I’ve only seen a little of Mohammad Saif Uddin in the Asia Cup.

What I like about these kids is they really, really just want to learn. They are enthusiastic, they train very hard. I can’t ask for more than what they are doing at this moment. So, I like what I see and what excites me the most is that the progress made in the last six-seven months has been quite steady and significant.

Do you believe that the pace attack Bangladesh has is good enough to find success in the T20 World Cup in Australia?

Donald: Yes, it’s a very good attack. And I’m not the only one saying it. Other coaches have come to me and said this Bangladesh pace attack is a good attack. And we have shown in the Asia Cup what can be done. And that’s the exciting thing for me. We threw out there Ebadot in there, who out of all of them is the guy that has slowly but surely smashed the door down. He has just shown that he is not just a red-ball candidate. He can play in all formats, and he has worked very hard to fight his way in there. And he has shown. Every single time he has come on, he has broken a partnership.

Hasan Mahmud really impressed me in Zimbabwe. He swung the ball late upfront, took early wickets, and he is a pretty steady death bowler. I just love the camaraderie among them, along with the competition between them. It should be a lot of fun.

So, I love the competition within the group. I think there is all of a sudden, a good crop of young guys, and it will be a headache for the selectors and the captain to pick the bowling attack for our first match (in the World Cup) in Hobart. This trip to New Zealand will be a really good marker to put down for everyone. It’ll give Sriram a good look at the players to see who fits in and decide who bowls where. I think the biggest challenge for us, like every other team in the world, is going to be how good and how calm we can be at the death. But it really is exciting.

In the Asia Cup, we have seen Bangladesh struggling with their death bowling in general. Have you started working on something to solve this issue?

Donald: We have been talking about this now for the last three months, on our road to the World Cup and our death bowling mindset. We have been working terribly hard since that. In the Asia Cup, death bowling sessions in training have been absolutely spot on. But you won’t get tested in the nets. You are going to be tested when the heat is at its worst, and that is when we need to close a game out.

I have been working on that in my off period on a little micro-challenge within the game. I don’t want to talk much about it, I just want to share it with my players. But that micro-challenge is basically a mindset challenge where we don’t get too far ahead of ourselves. A lot of players these days think about the outcome of the over rather than what can I do to win this ball. Everything about that death bowling attitude is. There’s a saying in the US military that ‘fast is smooth and smooth is slow’. It’s the way they think of moving as they move quickly, but comfortably and slowly, along with thinking clearly.

I have tried to find a system to break down those four overs into a micro-challenge, where we stay in the present. We don’t think about what could happen at the end of the over, we think about how we can win every ball, and we focus on just that ball. I will try and slow everything down.

So, this is something I am going to present to the team. There are so many things that work in your head and it forces you to bad decision making. And that’s not just our problem. It’s a problem all over the world. Everybody makes mistakes. We all have our methods, and this is something I am going to try out once I reach New Zealand.