Shakib Al Hasan International Ban Ended Last Month:

Shakib Al Hasan, whose international ban ended late last month, is one of 113 cricketers who must pass a fitness test before making it to the draught of the upcoming Bangabandhu T20 tournament, to be held on 9 and 10 November.

On the first day, a total of 80 cricketers, including Shakib, will be tested at the indoor facility of the Shere Bangla National Stadium, supervised by strength and conditioning coaches from the board. None of them, though they have been asked to obey health guidelines, need to undergo a Covid-19 examination.

On October 29, the 12-month ban on the star all-rounder, for failure to disclose corrupt approaches, ended. Shakib is in Minnesota at the moment, but is scheduled to arrive later this week in Dhaka.

Last week, chief selector Minhajul Abedin said the board wanted Shakib to play the T20 competition, the second domestic season event in 2020-21, which doesn’t have too much cricket as Bangladesh is recovering from the effects of the situation with Covid-19.

A three-team President’s Cup was conducted by the BCB in October, where 46 cricketers were selected from the Bangladesh preliminary squad for the postponed Sri Lanka series and from the high-performance set-up. The Bangabandhu tournament is likely to be a five-team competition, with the BCB, which has been trying to slowly bring cricket back to the country, handling the bio-secure bubbles, starting in late November.

It is the ongoing effort of the board to slowly put back all the domestic competitions one by one, but not without handling the bio-bubble in these two tournaments on their own.

In addition to Shakib, 31 Bangladesh internationals have been invited to the tests, including Nasir Hossain, Sohag Gazi and Shahriar Nafees, who have not been in the national team ‘s scheme for a long time-the last 35-year-old Nafees to play internationally in April 2013.

The majority of the group consists of first-class or club-level cricketers who played in the National Cricket League, the Bangladesh Cricket League, and the Premier League of Dhaka last season. Many of these cricketers have been practising in nets and gyms, and some have even taken part in small T20 tournaments across the nation to keep fit, since since mid-March they have not played any competitive cricket.