Chandika Hathurusingha did not submit a report after the tour of South Africa. That is one of the two things that fans of Bangladesh cricket know for certain about the premature exit of Bangladesh's most successful coach. The other thing they have come to know is from the horse's mouth when in a recent interview the Sri Lankan said that he quit his Bangladesh post because he could not take the team any further.
The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) had wanted a formal report from the coach, but they confirmed that what they got was a verbal one when Hathurusingha came to complete the final rites in the second week of December 2017. Additionally, Hathurusingha's temporary successor and current technical director of the team Khaled Mahmud said that he has not been furnished with a report on the previous tour, which would have been helpful in guiding the team ahead of their next assignment. The next assignment, coincidentally, is an ODI tri-series and Test and T20I series that involve Sri Lanka, the team that Hathurusingha took charge of after failing to fulfil the duration of his contract with the BCB.
A coach admitted after serving just one year of a three-year contract -- which was renewed mid-2016 -- that he could take his charges no further and he also failed to submit a report after being at the helm for Bangladesh's worst tour in a decade. These two facts are the only certainties in a saga that has been shrouded in conjecture fuelled chiefly by none other than BCB president Nazmul Hassan since it came to light shortly after the end of the South Africa tour that Hathurusingha submitted his resignation through email mid-tour.
After Hathurusingha's resignation, Hassan has consistently spun speculation about why he may have left while at the same time saying that he was uncertain of the exact reasons. The speculation ranged from current Test captain Shakib Al Hasan asking for a break from Test cricket to the players being too friendly with the media.
Hathurusingha however insisted, in the interview, that it was because he needed enough time to coach Sri Lanka -- his dream -- before he reached an age when he would want to spend more time with family, and that he had taken Bangladesh as far as he could go, which evidently means seven comprehensive hammerings on a tour of South Africa. If his words are taken at face value, it begs the question of why he signed on for a three-year contract in the first place if he was in a hurry to coach Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan is a coach feted for his planning and professionalism, but on the evidence of the above, only the former can be true, and that too when it comes to his own coaching career. Sri Lanka had offered him the position numerous times and he chose to take it up and desert his post in Bangladesh at a time when the team was at its lowest in the last three years. He also left his post without furnishing his employers with a formal report on the South Africa debacle, which can only have hamstrung his former charges for matches against his current charges. Unprofessional is perhaps the best thing that can be said about his legacy at this point.
