National Cricketers Unhappy With Mca For Ending Coach's Service Without Prior Notice

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 1 (Bernama) -- National cricketers are not happy with the way the Malaysia Cricket Association (MCA) ended the national men’s coach Bilal Asad’s service, leading to a boycott of the national selection match on Thursday.

Former Pakistan international Bilal’s contract ended yesterday (Nov 30) but the MCA did not extend his service.

National team vice-captain Virandeep Singh, who confirmed the fiasco said the national cricket team felt disappointed on how the MCA’s top management handled the issue without informing or discussing with Bilal and the players.

 “The management should have at least informed us about this. There was no written notification to the coach or the team all this while, and the only reason we heard unofficially, was because the performance was stagnant, which is unacceptable because on record we have shown progress.

“We want to make it clear that, it’s not that we wouldn’t play under the new coach MCA was going to appoint, we would support the new coach in his tenure for sure, that’s not even a question, 100 percent we will play because we love the sport above anything.

“But we are disappointed with the way they’re handling the situation and felt that we need to stand for this. We felt it is a massive disrespect to our coach, who has contributed and sacrificed about a decade of his life with Malaysian cricket, by just informing him that he has lost his job on the last day of his contract,” he told Bernama.

Earlier, media reported that a MCA 50-overs Championship match on Thursday, dubbed as national selection tournament, was called off after the players refused to play.

Virandeep, 24, said since Bilal started to coach the national team, Malaysia has climbed from 39th to 25th spot in the world ranking.

“Our overall winning percentage under coach Bilal is 64.8 percent, where we enjoyed 84 percent winning rate at home. We struggled in overseas due to the lack of exposure and playing opportunities against best teams, which has been told to the management previously.

“Some of the matches we played away, we just lost narrowly lost, like in the recent Hangzhou Asian Games, we lost to Bangladesh, a test playing nation, only by two runs in the quarter-finals,” he said.

Efforts to reach MCA President Mohammed Iqbal Ali Kassim Ali wasn’t successful as of press time.

-- BERNAMA