ICC Champions Trophy 2025: Bangladesh assistant coach Salahuddin blames ‘non-ideal preparation’ for early exit

ICC Champions Trophy 2025: Bangladesh assistant coach Salahuddin blames ‘non-ideal preparation’ for early exit

Bangladesh came into the Champions Trophy with a lot of expectations, but defeats against India and New Zealand dashed its hopes of reaching the semifinals.

Ahead of its final group league game against Pakistan, at the Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium on Thursday, the team’s senior assistant coach Mohammad Salahuddin admitted that the preparation wasn’t ideal, leading up to the ICC event.

Bangladesh did not play international cricket since mid-December last year due to the Bangladesh Premier League – a domestic T20 franchise tournament – and played a solitary 50-over warm-up game against Pakistan Shaheens (Pakistan A) in Dubai, where it lost by seven wickets.

“I will just say that maybe our preparation wasn’t ideal,” Salahuddin said. “I believe that was a major factor. However, I don’t want to make excuses because when you play international cricket, you have to adapt quickly. You might be playing Test cricket, but at the same time, you may also have to play T20s and ODIs. This is not an excuse, and I don’t want to give any,” he said, adding that the team needed to adjust faster, and that was a big miss on its part.

Having worked with the team for a while now, Salahuddin believes that the mental aspects of transitioning from one format to another need to be adapted to quickly. “If we can do that, we will perform better at this level,” he said. 

“In ODIs, we were perhaps a strong team, and I still wouldn’t say that we have no future in this format. In both matches, we played poorly for just 30 minutes, and that cost us the game. But we also saw how to bounce back — Zaker and (Towhid) Hridoy showed that in the first match. I think (Najmul Hasan) Shanto and Zaker played well in the last innings too. We were about 50 runs behind, yet we were in a position to make up those runs. We need to quickly identify and fix those areas to improve,” he added.

At a time when teams are easily breaching the 350-run mark in the 50-over format, Bangladesh has regressed. It went on to score 228 against India and managed only 240 runs against New Zealand.