||Desk Reporters||

While we see everyone related to the game of cricket consulting experts whenever they face some inconveniences in their respective duties, pitch curators are the ones that hardly have any special programs organized solely for them to improve in their own area.

ICC pitch consultant Andy Atkinson is now leading a program to train the curators on certain aspects of supervising a cricket pitch, in Bangladesh. Atkinson has been working as the ‘coach’ of the curators of this country while the newly-appointed coaches of the national team are training the cricketers.

“Over the years of cricket that I’ve been involved in, [I’ve seen] they always coach the women’s and the men’s [team] players, the coach, the umpires, the match referees, or even anybody who cooks dinner or tea; but they never coach the groundsmen. And we’re doing that now. We’re coaching the groundsmen,” Atkinson told reporters, on Tuesday [September 4].

The two major cricketing venues of the country – Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium and Zahur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium located in Dhaka and Chittagong, respectively – have been handed demerit points by the ICC earlier this year. Although avoiding such penalties is not the goal of the training program, it will surely help the curators a lot in fathoming the standards that should be maintained in the pitches.

Other than the two aforementioned venues, there are also many stadiums in the country, where the wickets are maintained by people who need to have more knowledge in this regard and this training program also includes those people.

“We are basically running a high-level curator-course workshop all over the country. It’s just a training program.

“We will be going through the whole process of preparing pitches, outfield, and drainage out of fertilized turfs,” said Atkinson.