Bangladesh appoint Wasim Jaffer as academy batting coach

The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has appointed India's domestic stalwart Wasim Jaffer as the batting coach for game development of its high performance academy in Dhaka. The veteran opener, who played 31 Tests (five hundreds and 11 fifties) and two ODIs for India, will spend six months in an year with Bangladesh's batsmen at the academy, TOI has learnt.

Apparently, Jaffer accepted the offer after being approached for the job by BCB. The 41-year-old was in Bangladesh for a couple of weeks to play in the Dhaka Premier League for Abahani Limited. On that trip, the BCB officials were impressed upon seeing the seasoned campaigner at the nets. Recently, a few net sessions with the Mumbai run-machine helped Bangladesh batsman Soumya Sarkar score a hundred and a double-hundred in the DPL, Bangladesh's premier One-day competition.

"I have seen his (Wasim) batting very closely. He is a very good and experienced player. He has scored 40,000 runs in his career. Since he scored such amount of runs, so he definitely has the quality," Soumya had said.

Revealing how he picked Jaffer's brains, Soumya had said: "I have understood how he thinks in the field and outside the field. I also follow his way of batting. I talked with him about this, nothing more than that and just tried to follow his instructions."

At the academy, Jaffer will train Bangladesh batsmen in the U-19s, the A team and also the senior side.

For Jaffer, this will be his first international coaching assignment.