Bangladesh May Tour Kenya

According to this report on Cricinfo, Bangladesh are keen to play a three match One Day series in Kenya en route to Zimbabwe in July. Both boards appear keen, so without counting the eggs too soon, it seems the national side could be back in action before the trip to Canada at the end of July. With the Bangladesh A team also due to tour Zimbabwe before the full team, it would be great if Kenya could also get them to stop over for a couple of four day matches. More ODIs is great, and will only help strengthen the Kenya side, but the experience from playing the longer version is priceless. With the touted tour of Uganda and A team tour of Denmark ahead, a visit by Bangladesh will certainly neatly fill up a gap in the calendar, and should help keep the team in form.

For Kenya, hosting Bangladesh makes sense. First it will be a chance to redeem ourselves from the 4-0 whitewash when we toured them. While it is still very early since then, Roger Harper will by now have a much clearer picture on who he can expect to fit into his plans for the future, and will have had longer to work with the team and improve technique. Every time Kenya plays one of the better teams, our players learn and improve, so even if the results are not what we want from this tour, at least the team will come out of it playing better. Then from a publicity point of view, it will be a great way to promote the game within Kenya. Ideally it would be great to have at least one of the proposed matches played in Mombasa, but how this will work logistically will depend on the tour dates.

For Bangladesh, it will be a handy warm up before Zimbabwe, and I'm sure they will also be looking on it as an opportuntiy to earn some more points on the ODI rankings table. The task ahead of Steve Tikolo and the team is to ensure that Kenya spring a surprise on home soil and earn a few points of our own.

Fingers crossed that this goes ahead. It is about time Kenya got to play some home games against one of the Test sides, and it reflects well on Bangladesh that they are willing to support the Associates in their efforts to improve. Let's hope we get confirmation of this soon.