Bangladesh's Great Opening Batters: A Short List

Opening the batting is the position Bangladesh has struggled hardest to fill. More than thirty players have been tried at the top of the Test order since 2000, most of them for a handful of matches, and the country has produced exactly one opener whose record stands comparison with the good openers of other Test nations.

That is not an unusual complaint — England spent a decade doing the same thing — but the Bangladeshi version has a specific cause. Bangladesh's domestic cricket rewards a batter who can play spin from the fifteenth over onwards on a slow surface. It does very little to prepare anybody for the new ball in Wellington, Johannesburg or Kingston, and the Test record of Bangladeshi openers away from home reflects exactly that gap.

The position, and why it is so hard here

Two problems compound each other.

The first is technical. A Bangladesh opener spends most of his domestic career on low, slow pitches where the ball does not carry to the keeper and where the danger comes from turn rather than seam movement or bounce. The habits that succeed there — playing with hard hands, hitting through the line, going back rather than forward — are liabilities against a full-length new ball on a surface with pace in it. The conditions are set out in the guide to pitch types and conditions in Bangladesh.

The second is selection. Because openers have failed repeatedly, they have been changed repeatedly, which means very few have been given the twelve or fifteen Tests it takes to work anything out. That habit is part of the wider pattern discussed in the guide to Bangladesh's captains: a board that reacts series by series rather than across cycles.

Athar Ali Khan and the era before Test cricket

Bangladesh had openers before it had Test status, and the best of them was Athar Ali Khan, who played nineteen one-day internationals between October 1988 and May 1998, scoring 532 runs at 29.55 with a highest score of 82.

An average of just under thirty in nineteen matches would be unremarkable in most contexts. In this one it made him comfortably the most reliable batter Bangladesh had. He made 78 not out from 95 balls against Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens on the last day of 1990 and won the match award, and in 1998 he shared a 137-run opening stand against Kenya in the match that produced Bangladesh's first one-day international win.

Athar had been encouraged to open regularly by Mohinder Amarnath, who worked with the Bangladesh side, and he bowled some slow-medium as well. He is the only opener from that generation with a record worth quoting, which tells its own story about the standard of the era described in the guide to the history of Bangladesh cricket.

Javed Omar, and a debut nobody has matched

Javed Omar's Test career reads modestly: forty matches, 1,720 runs at 22.05, one century and eight fifties, with a highest score of 119. He was a blocker in an era when Bangladesh needed blockers and did not have any.

His first Test is the reason he is remembered. On debut against Zimbabwe on 19 April 2001, Omar carried his bat for 85 not out — remaining unbeaten while the other ten wickets fell — becoming only the third player in the history of Test cricket to do so in a debut innings. It was the sort of achievement that suggested a long and stubborn career, and the career was long without being productive.

The gap between the debut and the average is the honest summary of Bangladeshi opening batsmanship in the 2000s. Omar could occupy the crease. He could not score quickly enough, on the surfaces he was given, to make occupation pay.

Shahriar Nafees at Fatullah

Shahriar Nafees was the first Bangladeshi opener who looked like he belonged. A left-hander with time and a full range of strokes, he played twenty-four Tests for 1,267 runs at 26.39 and seventy-five one-day internationals for 2,201 at 31.44 with four centuries.

His single Test hundred is the innings people remember. On 9 April 2006, against Australia at the Khan Shaheb Osman Ali Stadium in Fatullah, Nafees made 138 in a Test that Bangladesh came close to winning and eventually lost. Australia at that point had a batting order full of players who would end up in any all-time eleven, and Nafees was twenty years old.

In the same calendar year he passed 1,000 one-day international runs, the first Bangladeshi to do so in a year, with three of his four hundreds coming against Zimbabwe and the fourth against Bermuda at the start of 2007. What followed was a decline neither he nor the selectors managed to arrest, and he was out of the Test side before he was twenty-five.

Tamim Iqbal

Tamim Iqbal is the exception, and the scale of the gap between him and everyone else on this page is worth setting out plainly.

He played seventy Tests, scoring 5,134 runs at 38.89 with ten centuries, thirty-one fifties and a highest score of 206. In one-day internationals he made 8,357 runs in 243 matches at 36.65, with fourteen centuries and a top score of 158. In Twenty20 internationals he added 1,758 runs at 24.08, including a hundred.

The records attached to that are almost all national firsts. Tamim was the first Bangladeshi to 10,000 international runs and then to each thousand up to 14,000; the first to 6,000, 7,000 and 8,000 one-day international runs; and the only Bangladeshi to score centuries in all three international formats. His twenty-five international centuries are the Bangladesh record. He was Wisden Cricketer of the Year and the Wisden Test player of the year in 2011.

What made him different was the method rather than the aggregate. Tamim opened by attacking. He pulled from in front of his face, cut hard, and went at the new ball in a way no Bangladeshi opener had, and he did it from his teens — he was one of the three debutants who beat India at Port of Spain in 2007, described in the account of the 2007 World Cup run. The approach cost him wickets and produced the scores nobody else in the country was producing.

He also captained: one Test and thirty-seven one-day internationals, winning twenty-one of the latter, which is the best win ratio of any Bangladesh captain with a meaningful sample. He retired from international cricket on 10 January 2025.

Imrul Kayes, the partner

Imrul Kayes spent much of a decade as the other opener, which is a harder job than it sounds when your partner is the country's best batter and the selectors are looking for a reason to change somebody.

He played thirty-nine Tests for 1,797 runs at 24.28 with three centuries and a highest score of 150, and seventy-eight one-day internationals for 2,434 at 32.02 with four hundreds and a best of 144. He was Bangladesh's leading run-scorer at the 2011 World Cup, with 188 runs at 37.60 and two match awards, and in October 2018 he scored 349 runs across a three-match one-day series against Zimbabwe.

He also holds an obscure world record, which is the kind of detail that survives longer than averages. Keeping wicket as a substitute during a Test against New Zealand in 2017, Kayes took five catches in an innings — the most by a substitute keeper in a Test innings.

The Test average of 24 is the problem, and it is the same problem as Javed Omar's from a slightly different angle: a batter good enough to be picked for a decade and not good enough to settle the position.

Litton Das, and the 292

Litton Das is the second-best opener Bangladesh has had, with the complication that he is also a wicketkeeper and has batted everywhere from one to six.

His Test record is 3,356 runs in fifty-five matches at 36.08, with six centuries and a highest score of 141 — the best Test batting average of any Bangladeshi who has kept wicket. In one-day internationals he has 2,869 runs at 30.84 with five hundreds and a top score of 176, and in Twenty20 internationals more than 2,700 runs across 122 matches.

The 176 came in March 2020 against Zimbabwe, in an innings during which he and Tamim Iqbal put on 292 for the first wicket — the highest partnership for any wicket in Bangladesh's one-day international history. For a country whose opening pairs had been a running weakness, a stand of that size was a genuine landmark rather than a statistical curiosity.

Litton became Bangladesh's permanent Twenty20 international captain in May 2025, appointed through to the 2026 World Cup, and his keeping is assessed in the survey of Bangladesh's great wicketkeepers.

Rawalpindi, 2024, and who actually did the work

The best away Test result in Bangladesh's history is a useful test of this page's argument, because it was not built by openers.

In the first Test at Rawalpindi in August 2024, Bangladesh replied to Pakistan's 448 for 6 declared with 565, and won by ten wickets. The innings was constructed by Mushfiqur Rahim, who made 191 from 341 balls and took the match award — a wicketkeeper-batter at number six. In the second Test, which Bangladesh won by six wickets to complete a two-nil sweep, the decisive innings was Litton Das's 138, made from number seven in a 165-run seventh-wicket stand with Mehidy Hasan Miraz. Zakir Hasan opened and contributed in the fourth innings without dominating.

That is the shape of most good Bangladesh Test performances: a middle order that rebuilds after the openers have gone. It is a workable way to win a match and a poor way to build a batting side, because it means the recognised batters are routinely coming in against a ball that is still hard and bowlers who are still fresh.

The corollary is that Bangladesh's best batting innings has often come from someone batting out of position. Litton's highest Test score has come from the middle order rather than the top, and he has opened in white-ball cricket while batting lower in Tests, which is a reasonable use of a good player and an admission that the specialist opening slot remains unfilled.

The ones who did not last

The list of openers tried and discarded is long, and a few names recur in the conversation.

Soumya Sarkar and Anamul Haque were both given extended runs on the strength of domestic form and neither converted it into a Test record. Nazimuddin, Tushar Imran and Shamsur Rahman all opened in Tests without establishing themselves. More recently, several young openers have been introduced, dropped after two or three matches and returned to the Dhaka Premier Division — which is a competition that produces one-day runs on flat surfaces and, as the guide to club cricket history sets out, is not designed to prepare a batter for a new ball in South Africa.

The pattern is consistent enough that it is fairer to blame the system than the players. A Bangladeshi opener arrives in Test cricket having faced very few genuinely fast bowlers, on very few surfaces with bounce in them, and is then judged over three or four innings.

What the position needs

Player	Tests	Test runs	Test average	ODI runs	ODI average
Tamim Iqbal	70	5,134	38.89	8,357	36.65
Litton Das	55	3,356	36.08	2,869	30.84
Imrul Kayes	39	1,797	24.28	2,434	32.02
Javed Omar	40	1,720	22.05	1,312	23.85
Shahriar Nafees	24	1,267	26.39	2,201	31.44

The table makes the case for itself. Two players with Test averages in the middle thirties, three in the low twenties to mid-twenties, and nobody at all above forty.

The encouraging development is not in the batting at all. Bangladesh has begun producing fast bowlers, as the guide to fast bowling growth describes, and domestic openers who spend a season facing genuine pace in their own competition will arrive in Test cricket better equipped than Javed Omar's generation did. That is a slow mechanism and the only one available.

For the batters at the other end of the order, see the survey of Bangladesh's great all-rounders; for career records, the player index; and for the rest of the game, the cricket in Bangladesh hub.

Sources and method

Career figures on this page come from published international career records for each player and are given as at the most recently completed series; the numbers for active cricketers will move. Individual landmarks — Javed Omar carrying his bat on debut, Shahriar Nafees's 138 at Fatullah, Tamim Iqbal's national run and century records and his Wisden awards, Imrul Kayes's substitute-keeping record, the Tamim-Litton 292 — are drawn from official match records and published award lists for the dates named. The selection of players for this page, and the judgement that only two of them have Test records of international standard, are editorial and argued for above rather than computed from any dataset of ours.