Great expectations from McInnes' second Bangladesh stint

Among the appointments of foreign coaches in Bangladesh this year, Richard McInnes' easily stands out, even counting the abrupt change in the senior team's coach in April. The point is, not many coaches return to a post, so McInnes' comeback as the head coach of Bangladesh's National Cricket Academy (NCA) for a two-year period has drawn plenty of interest in the country.

McInnes is realistic about why he is back in Bangladesh: to produce international-quality players. "My job is to produce players for the national team, and these players will play domestic cricket as well," McInnes told ESPNcricinfo. "Hopefully, as a byproduct of their time here (at the NCA), they'll dominate domestic cricket and get selected for the national team.

"My job is to provide very strong support to Richard Pybus (the national coach) and his team. I want to make sure we provide anything they need; players who aren't on tour for the different formats, they'll be getting ready here for their particular format, whether its Test, ODIs or Twenty20s. We'll have a very strong link between the national team and this place."

The seven years since 2005, when McInnes stepped down from his post of manager of Bangladesh's high performance unit, have seen many changes, the biggest being the increase in international wins and the emergence of a few more dependable players. Back then, he was the man in charge of the only available source of players for a Test team that had many revolving doors.

Now the academy, just like the high performance unit, is modeled after a finishing school for cricketers, from where they are just a step away from the Bangladesh A team. But spots in the national team are not completely guaranteed these days, even for those who are earmarked as special talents, simply because the selection panels nowadays won't punt on a 17-year-old 'genius'. The player must perform in domestic cricket as well, and McInnes' is someone who has knowledge of the country's first-class structure.

"The first-class system here needs some work from what I've been hearing," he said. "One of the challenges is the absence of quality fast bowling, and wickets where ball swings and bounces. These are the conditions the Bangladesh team tends to struggle with when they go overseas. That's not easily fixed because of the climatic and soil conditions.

"[For the cricketers] it is a little bit like the chicken and the egg: batsmen get criticised when they can't do well against fast bowling, but they don't get 6'4", 6'6" fast bowlers at home. We'll try and create some things [to aid them in this respect] here."

McInnes is hardly a fan of a quick evolution. He is appreciative of having a first-class system in place which will, for example, teach a batsman how to bat an entire day. "How do you train someone to bat for five to six hours in a Test match? You can't train them - that's where the first-class competition is really, really important. We need players to bat out a day in first-class cricket, come back the next day and bat till lunch on day two. We will try to get players to make big hundreds in first-class cricket."

His primary goal will be to prepare players for each spot in the national team, thereby increasing competition and raising the performance of the incumbents. "If we're all doing our job, we have two-three players for every position in the national team. [Then] there's real competition for the spots. Players who are in the national team know that they have to perform well to hold on to that spot.

"The thing that I bring [to the job] is making sure we're thorough, preparing across all areas. There's an advantage with a live-in programme [like the NCA's], we have a lot of time to do these things."

McInnes' is also pleased with the new facilities at his disposal. When he was with the high performance unit, he had spent many hours on the road during his daily commute to BKSP, the sports institute located 40km north of Dhaka. The NCA, on the other hand, built on the Shere Bangla National Stadium premises in Mirpur, comes with its own field and residential quarters.

Seeing players who worked with him at the high performance unit make the step up to the international level, has pleased him, McInnes said. "Eleven out of the 13 who played in the Asia Cup [in March] were in the programme. I was in India at the time, watching the matches, and I talked to Mushfiqur [Rahim, the Bangladesh captain] on Facebook. I was very proud of that, and I think a lot of those players understand what they need to do to be successful."

The high performance programme collapsed following McInnes' departure in 2005, and Shakib Al Hasan, in recent years, has often spoken of restarting it. However, when it first began, the cricketers were not too pleased with the tough training regimen in place, as well as the food that they were served. Now, almost every cricketer from those camps are now either playing for Bangladesh (Shakib, Mushfiqur, Tamim Iqbal), have played for the team (Alok Kapali, Naeem Islam, Shahadat Hossain, Shahriar Nafees) or are on the fringes, like Shamsur Rahman. And these players remember McInnes for the changes he brought about in Bangladesh cricket and the skills he made them develop.

This time around, McInnes will have to deal with the weightier expectations, fueled by the success he enjoyed during that last stint in the country. He will get his first taste of how much Bangladesh has changed since then when the NCA takes on the West Indies High Performance team in September.