'Shakib Al Hasan – all-time great, but no role model'- Boria Majumdar

The runs and wickets say enough about what a great cricketer Shakib Al Hasan was. But his legacy will also include plenty of controversies, several of them quite avoidable.

Shakib Al Hasan is Bangladesh’s greatest ever cricketer. But as he calls it a day, the question is how he will be remembered, Will his politics come in the way, and will he have to live elsewhere with what is going on back home in Bangladesh? Or will the current political dispensation be kind and reasonable enough to give him the farewell he deserves? 

Shakib isn’t the most endearing personality. He isn’t Mashtafe Mortaza, for example. He is elite, and a star who was always a cut above the rest. Be it in his 7500 runs in 50-over cricket or his 300 wickets, Shakib was Bangladesh cricket’s answer to greatness for a decade and more. But may be because he was so good, he was undiplomatic as well. From kicking the stumps to getting a batter timed out, Shakib was always a maverick whom cricket learned to love and hate over time. 

So what’s his real legacy, someone asked me. How will he be looked at 20 years down the line? Honestly, these aren’t straightforward questions. While his talent is beyond doubt, that he was not always the perfect role model is also a fact. As a cricketer, he had no rival in Bangladesh. Tamim Iqbal, Mushfiqur Rahim, Mashrafe and everyone else were at best a good support cast. Shakib was always the hero. He was the colossus who added teeth and muscle. He was the most-sought-after gem in franchise leagues across the world. He was the symbol that Bangladesh cricket had turned the tide. 

At the same time, do you want an aspiring cricketer to model himself on Shakib? To call a batsman out because he is late? To fight with umpires and kick the stumps? That’s where his genius needed to be reined in. Controlled and tempered. But then, not everyone is perfect and not everything is always how you want it to be. Shakib was always in your face, and yet someone whom Bangladesh couldn’t do without. That’s him. Their best ever, and yet, one of the most controversial as well. He is Shakib, and cricket needs to remember him exactly as he was – a maverick who left his mark while competing hard to give Bangladesh cricket the respect it had lacked earlier.

 Writer- Boria Majumdar, Indian journoulist.