Cricket Masala

The Bangladesh Cricket Board is in freefall. Six directors have resigned in under six months. Three of them walked out on the same evening, within hours of each other, following a marathon board meeting in Dhaka that evidently ended badly enough to push multiple people toward the exit simultaneously. And the elected president is vowing to stay put regardless, insisting he’ll be “the last person to go.”

This is not a normal stretch of institutional turbulence. This is a full-blown governance collapse, playing out in real time.

Three Resignations in One Evening Signals Deep Fractures in the BCB

Saturday’s board meeting, chaired by president Aminul Islam with vice-president Faruque Ahmed dialing in online due to illness, produced no official drama. At least, not publicly. Media chairman Mohammad Mokhsedul Kamal told journalists after the briefing that he’d learned about Faiazur Rahman’s resignation from the news rather than from the man himself, who had sat in the same meeting just hours earlier. That’s a remarkable thing to admit. Shanian Taneem and Mehrab Alam Chowdhury followed shortly after.

Kamal told reporters the resignations were personal decisions. “We haven’t discussed this at the board,” he said.

Faiazur had been the vice-chairman of the Cricket Committee of Dhaka Metropolis — the BCB body that runs the Dhaka leagues — and had recently gone public with criticism of the BCB’s handling of those leagues. His departure wasn’t entirely out of nowhere. But three resignations in one evening, citing personal reasons, from a board that has historically seen directors serve out full terms? That’s a different kind of signal entirely. The explanation felt thin even as it was being delivered.

A Timeline of Departures That Keeps Getting Worse

The Saturday triple exit didn’t come out of nowhere. It came at the end of a slow bleed that started in January.

Ishtiaque Sadeque was the first to go, citing personal reasons, and then Amzad Hossain sent his resignation notice a couple of days after being removed as media chairman — a sequence that required minimal reading between the lines. Yasir Mohammed Faysal, a government-nominated director, resigned on Thursday; and then came the Saturday three. Six directors gone. Under six months. From a board where departures were once rare enough to be genuinely newsworthy on their own.

The cumulative picture is of an institution where people in positions of power are choosing to leave rather than stay. That choice — made repeatedly, by different people, for reasons that keep being described as “personal” — tells its own story.

Government Scrutiny Is Mounting Over BCB Elections and T20 World Cup Absence

The internal fractures in the BCB don’t exist in a vacuum. The board is facing serious pressure from Bangladesh’s sports ministry on multiple fronts at once.

A government-appointed committee has been investigating allegations of malpractice and abuse of power in the BCB’s October board elections. That report is expected to land on the sports ministry’s desk as early as next week. Sports minister Aminul Haque has separately indicated he wants another inquiry — this one focused on why Bangladesh didn’t participate in the T20 World Cup earlier this year, a glaring absence nobody’s properly explained. And then there’s the broader allegation of political favoritism within the BCB, which Haque raised at a parliamentary session last week.

So the board is dealing with a probe into how it elected its leadership, questions about a major international tournament absence, and accusations of partisan interference in its operations — all while directors keep resigning and the government signals it may not consider the current setup legitimate.

Aminul Islam’s Defiance in the Face of a Crumbling Board

“I will sit in my chair, what else can I do?” BCB president Aminul Islam told Jamuna TV on Saturday. “I will be the last person to go.” He means it! Through all of it, he isn’t moving.

It’s a striking posture for someone whose board is emptying out around him and whose election is under active government investigation. But Aminul’s argument is essentially that his experience — he’s the only Bangladeshi to have worked at the ICC, he points out — makes him the right person for the job regardless of the circumstances.

“I left everything to be here to support my country,” he said. “If this is no longer mine, I will look at another path. But I want to support my country.”

On the investigation committee, Aminul says he didn’t appear in person because of scheduling conflicts, and submitted a written reply instead. His account of his involvement in the elections is carefully narrow — he says his only role was writing to districts and divisions asking them to send names of councillors after most of them hadn’t done so through the ad-hoc committees. When only three names came in, he wrote again. That, he says, is all of it.

Whether the investigation committee sees it the same way is an open question, and the answer is seemingly coming soon.

How Aminul Islam Came to Lead the BCB — and Why That Matters Now

Aminul’s path to the BCB presidency is worth paying attention to, because it shapes why the current situation is so combustible.

He replaced Faruque Ahmed as the government-endorsed director in May 2025 — a move that reflected, in itself, political winds shifting. He described his role at the time as a “quick T20 innings,” suggesting a temporary tenure. Then October’s elections arrived and he ran anyway, winning officially as board president.

That’s where it got messy. Former Bangladesh captain Tamim Iqbal, who had entered the presidential race, withdrew and publicly alleged Aminul of malpractice and abuse of power in the election process. Those allegations fed into the government investigation that’s now nearing its conclusion.

So the man currently vowing to be the last one standing is the same man whose conduct in getting to the top of Bangladeshi cricket is under formal review by his own government. And the board that’s supposed to function around him has lost six of its members in six months.

What a Governance Crisis in Cricket Administration Actually Looks Like

Cricket governance crises tend to repeat the same patterns. There’s a contested election or leadership transition, followed by internal fractures, external pressure, and then a cascade of departures that accelerates once it starts. Take Cricket South Africa between 2018 and 2021 — the board lost eight directors in roughly two years, with three resigning in a single month in early 2019 following a governance review by Sport and Recreation South Africa. The on-the-ground consequence wasn’t just political theatre: the CSA’s high-performance pipeline slowed in ways that were hard to miss, with provincial contracts delayed and a national women’s programme review stalled for the better part of a year because the relevant committee had no quorum.

The PCB cycled through four chairmen between 2018 and 2023 — Najam Sethi, Ehsan Mani, Ramiz Raja, Najam Sethi again. Each transition came with board restructurings that left domestic tournament organizing committees reconstituted mid-season. A 2022 report by Pakistan’s Senate Standing Committee on IPC noted that three domestic tournaments that year had contracts unsigned at the time play began, a direct result of administrative vacuums created by the transitions.

Bangladesh cricket’s current situation fits that pattern pretty neatly. What the pattern tends to produce, once the political noise clears, is an institution that technically survives but operates at reduced capacity for longer than anyone says out loud. Sri Lanka Cricket, following its 2023 government-ordered reconstitution, took the better part of eighteen months to fully staff its age-group selectors and regional development officers — a delay that had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with positions simply not being filled.

None of that makes the turbulence any less damaging to how the board actually functions, or to the cricket it’s supposed to be administering. What makes this particular moment stand out is the speed. Six resignations in under six months. Three in a single evening. A government report about to drop. A president refusing to budge.

Even if Aminul weathers this — even if the investigation clears him, the resignations stop, and the ministry backs off — the BCB has still lost experienced directors at a rate which is going to affect its day-to-day operations. Committees don’t run themselves, and the Dhaka leagues Faiazur was already criticizing for poor management just lost the person who was supposed to be overseeing them. The gaps don’t disappear just because the political crisis eventually settles. One administrator who lived through West Indies Cricket Board’s fractious 2013-2016 period, when the board’s relationship with its players collapsed publicly mid-tour, later noted that the quieter damage was to the board’s relationships with regional cricket associations — relationships that took years to rebuild quietly, long after the headlines had moved on.

For Bangladesh cricket, the governance picture right now is as uncertain as it’s been in years. And Saturday’s triple resignation made sure everyone noticed. The question now is whether anyone in a position to act is paying attention.