Nilphamari nourishes indigo, not cricketers. The district, where once the British tortured labourers to cultivate ‘Neel’, or blue gold, lies only 356 kilometres north of Dhaka. The journey, though, would take nearly eight hours, cutting through the congested traffic and sinuous roads. Ten kilometres from the district centre is Nijpara, a dot in a speck, home of Bangladesh wrist-spinner Rishad Hossain.
It is this geographic aloofness from the national and cricketing capital that nurtured the growth of the rarest cricketing specimen in the country, the leg-spinner. In a country fixated with left-arm spinners, only two specialists leg-spinners have donned the colours of the country, Wahidul Gani and Jobair Hussain, before him. A part-time leg-spinner Alok Kapali grabbed a Test hat-trick, the first by his countrymen, but leg-spin was the art of outliers in Bangladesh.
For decades, the country did not care, deemed that leg-spinner was an indulgence an emerging cricketing nation like them could ill-afford; then they thought one would burst forth naturally; fruitless, and when leg-spinners became valuable in shorter formats, they tried to manufacture one, with the cricket board insisting domestic teams to field at least one in the playing eleven, before, wilting to resistance, changed the phrasing of the diktat, from mandatory to priority. We are a left-arm spinning nation, not a wrist-spinning one. The soul of Bangladesh cricket spoke. Some like Moshrafe Mortaza rued the lack of a pioneer. “Probably there is no legacy like Shakib and Rafique bhai as far as leg-spinners are concerned. It is the weakest link in Bangladesh cricket,” he once said.
Tape-ball cricket
In this time of despair, an adolescent Hussain, his world revolving around tape-ball tennis in the dry, parched fields, picked up a cricket ball and found that he was releasing the ball from his wrists, not finger. “The first time I picked the ball, I gripped it like a leg-spinner. It came naturally to me, and I stuck with it,” Rishad said in an interview with Daily Star. His childhood coach Arman Ali didn’t bother to tweak or tamper with what came naturally to him. “I didn’t change because there was no need to change,” says Ali, aka Monu bhai. “He was raw but had a spark, because of his height got good bounce, was brisk. He had to develop control, but the talent was there and took wickets in heaps in school cricket,” he says.
Bangladesh spinner Rishad Hossain celebrates a wicket against India. (ICC Media Zone)
But the facilities in the town were limited to chisel a cricketer of international-mettle. Nilamphari did not have a first-class ground; the only organised cricket happened after the Ramadan month and before the monsoon lashed in. Most of them were tennis-ball night cricket tournaments. The only multipurpose stadium hosted football matches. His father Nur Alam was a farmer and Rishad lived in a modest house with his parents and two sisters.
“But my father was always supportive of me. He had the belief that I would succeed as a cricketer,” he once told Pratham Alo. He not only made his father proud but also built a bigger house for his family and bought them a car. But the journey from Nilphamari to Dhaka was long, more than the 356km it took by road.
Back then, the big, and only hope, for spinners from outposts was the Robi Khoj Spin: The Number 1 Spinner, a talent hunt programme across the country. He competed in the Rangpur district trials and won the most accurate bowler prize and came second in the programme. “He was not a big turner of the ball, but turned enough both ways with accuracy, and from a young age, he had a good understanding of what the batsmen were upto,” Ali says.
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Once in the eye of the junior selectors, he was passed onto the seasoned hands of Wahid Gani, where he was refined and readied for first-class cricket. Three years after the talent hunt, he was sitting in the senior national camp. His comeuppance, though, was as much celebrated as scrutinised. How to harness the best out of him became a national obsession. Whether he would become successful became a national debate.
The overseas coaches stressed on careful grooming. Former coach Russel Domingo would say: “We have to be patient with him. Leg spin is a very difficult art. You cannot master it within a year or two. We have to pick him against the right teams. Pick him for the right conditions. If you pick a young leg spinner too early he bottles.”
The cynics circled on his lack of variations. In his early years, his leg-breaks hardly spun, he relied more on his wrong one. He held the ball higher inside the palm and had a high-arm action, so it was naturally difficult for his leg-breaks to keep its curvy shape and break away viciously. He remodelled his action slightly, locked his non-bowling arm during release, which in turn made the release slower and gave the ball more hang time in the air. As destiny had it Pakistan legend Mushtaq Ahmed joined the national team as spin coach.
His curve crawled upwards and he was handed his T20 debut in 2023, but it was not until the T20 World Cup, where he came of age. The three-wicket haul against Sri Lanka furnished a peep into his craft, considerably more evolved than when he made his debut. The leg-break would rip and turn, as he showed when he sumptuously foxed Dhananjaya de Silva in flight and embarrassed him with vicious break away. Later in the game against India, the leg-break deceived Shivam Dube. He was Bangladesh’s most successful spinner in the tournament, and a year later, he deceived Virat Kohli with a sudden change of length after limiting his scoring options.
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He has refined other aspects too. The wrong’un is sharper, the flipper has more fizz, he puts more revvs on the ball, is better at modulating pace and coaxes delicious drift. In T20Is, he occasionally gets hit, as the economy rate of 8.08 suggests. Most significantly, he gets the ball to dip — the best spin bowlers get the ball to turn off the pitch, but their greatest attribute is to make the ball dip in such a way that the batsmen cannot judge the length.
He also has a captain, Litton Das, that understands him and the rare craft he trades. In 42 games, he has already become the most successful leggie of his country in T20Is. He is only 23, is building his portfolio as a handy batsman down the order, and he perhaps is the leg-spin pathbreaker Bangladesh had been waiting for all these years. Only that it required the aloofness of Nilphamari to mould one.
