KUALA LUMPUR: 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 yesterday (November 30).
Former Pakistan international Bilal's contract ended yesterday (November 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 as to 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 will not play under the new coach MCA is going to appoint, we will support the new coach during his tenure for sure, there's no question about this, 100 per cent we will play because we love the sport above anything.
"But we are disappointed with the way they handled the situation and we feel that we need to stand up for this. We feel it is very disrespectful to coach Bilal, who has contributed and sacrificed about a decade of his life with Malaysian cricket, to just inform him that he has lost his job on the last day of his contract," he told Bernama.
Earlier, it was reported that a MCA 50-overs Championship match yesterday, 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 per cent, where we enjoyed 84 per cent winning rate at home. We struggled overseas due to the lack of exposure and playing opportunities against better teams, which has been told to the management.
"Some of the matches we played away, we just lost narrowly, 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 proved futile as of press time. — BERNAMA