Thrown out as a boy for loving cricket, Tanzid stands tall as a man Down Under

Tojammel Hossain was certain that cricket would ruin his son’s life.

His boy's obsession with the bat and ball, over his studies, frustrated and enraged Tojammel enough to throw him out of the house — thrice.

“He thought cricket would ruin both my studies and my future,” his son said years later, recalling an incident in which his father kicked him out of the house after a full day of cricket. “He told me, I don't need a son like you.”

The cricket-loving boy found refuge in his mother, Rehena Begum, who quietly worked around her husband's fury. 

She struck a bargain with her son: perform well in exams, and she would take him to watch matches at the ground. The trick worked. He began excelling academically even as his obsession with the game deepened under the eye of local coach Moslem Uddin.

On Friday, Tojammel and the rest of the the country saw that boy stare down the greatest Test attack in the world, battle against the likes of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, and Nathan Lyon, and come out triumphant. 

The teenager, once tossed out of his home for loving the game, etched his name – Tanzid Hasan Tamim – in the record books as Bangladesh’s only Test centurion on Australian soil.

And what was the first thing he did after making history: dedicate the knock to his parents. 

"Since the century is special, I want to dedicate it to my parents," Tanzid said. 

Bangladesh bowled Australia out for 198 on the opening day, and Tanzid closed out the day’s final session unbeaten on 32. He resumed on the second morning alongside Mominul Haque and simply refused to be hurried, absorbing the new ball with a composure that belied his inexperience.

He survived two let offs on his way to history. The first came on nought, on the opening evening, when Nathan Lyon shelled a simple catch off Josh Hazlewood’s bowling. 

The second arrived on 62, ironically off the bowling of Lyon, when wicketkeeper Alex Carey and Steve Smith combined unsuccessfully in the cordon and failed to hold on between them, a reprieve that grew costlier with every over that followed.

His handling of Carey standing up to the stumps when pacer Beau Webster stood out. Rather than dancing down the pitch and risk being stranded short of his crease, Tanzid adjusted by square driving through the off side, staying compact and refusing to give Australia's plans any purchase.

His first fifty took 102 balls and contained five boundaries. The second arrived far more briskly, in 86 deliveries, laced with three more fours and a lofted six off Webster after he charged down the pitch, a rare glimpse of the attacking game he had otherwise kept on a leash.

He reached three figures off the final ball of Nathan Lyon's 64th over, driving to long off and sprinting through for the single, leaping in celebration before he had even completed the run, spreading his bat and helmet wide.

He and Mominul had earlier added 102 for the second wicket before Mominul fell for 49, agonisingly short of Bangladesh's record second-wicket stand in Australia, the 108 shared by Habibul Bashar and Hannan Sarkar in Cairns in 2003.

Tanzid eventually fell for 101 off 197 balls, caught at long-off while attacking Lyon once more, in an innings built as much on restraint as on flair. His 93-run stand with Najmul Hossain Shanto, who made a fine 84, pushed Bangladesh well clear of Australia's total.

Tanzid had spent three years as a fixture in Bangladesh's white ball setup without ever being viewed as a Test opening candidate, until chief selector Habibul Bashar pushed for his inclusion specifically because of his attacking instinct. His first class record backed the punt, 1,792 runs from 25 matches at an average of 40.

"Tanzid has been in our thoughts for Test cricket. He has a very good first class record and we felt he deserved the opportunity," Bashar said after selecting him for the format for the first time, ahead of the series against Pakistan.

That debut came in Sylhet in May, yielding modest returns of 26 and four in a match Bangladesh won by 78 runs. 

He was subsequently left out of the squad for the one off Test against Zimbabwe, and warm up form in Australia against a Cricket Australia XI did little to inspire confidence, with scores of 0 and 22. But with one innings, Tanzid has vindicated Bashar’s judgement. 

The scale of the achievement stretched well beyond the scoreboard. Tanzid became only the second Asian batter in history to score a century in his maiden Test innings on Australian soil, joining Pakistan great Hanif Mohammad, who managed the feat 62 years earlier, in 1964, with an innings of 104.

He also ended a two-decade wait for Bangladesh's second Test centurion against Australia in any conditions, following Shahriar Nafees's 138 in Fatullah in 2006, and became the first to reach the mark specifically on Australian soil, surpassing Hannan's long-standing 76 at Cairns.

At 25 years and 256 days old, the innings placed him among a select group of visiting batters to score Test centuries in Australia against the trio of Cummins, Starc and Hazlewood, a list including Virat Kohli, Babar Azam, Cheteshwar Pujara, Rishabh Pant, Ajinkya Rahane, Yashasvi Jaiswal, David Malan, Jonny Bairstow and Yasir Shah.

Tanzid is now the 17th Bangladeshi to score a Test century away from home, behind Mushfiqur Rahim's six overseas hundreds, Tamim Iqbal and Shanto on four apiece, and Shakib Al Hasan, Mohammad Ashraful and Mahmudullah with three each among the country's most prolific travelling batters.

Tanzid's route into international cricket had never run in a straight line either. He earned his ODI debut right before the 2023 World Cup as a late replacement for Tamim, whose name he happens to share, arriving into a dressing room amid one of Bangladeshi cricket's periodic storms.

His white ball numbers were already substantial heading into the Darwin Test, 13 fifties from 53 T20 internationals, and in one-day cricket, nine half-centuries plus a maiden hundred earlier this year. He had finished last year as Bangladesh's leading run scorer and leading six-hitter in the shortest format.

Shanto, who watched much of the innings unfold from the other end, could barely hide his admiration afterwards. Speaking to Triple M Cricket, the captain said, "He [Tanzid] showed his character. Normally he doesn’t bat like this; he is naturally an attacking player."

Tanzid credited clear instructions from the team management for the shift in mindset. "The message was made clear to me when I was picked in the Test team. I have been batting with my ODI mindset in this format too. I had to be patient as they were not giving me much room," he said.

He was equally direct about his method against a bowling group he refused to rank by reputation. "I usually try to play to the merit of the ball, not the bowler. But they are the number one team in the world, so they make it hard for you, particularly with the new ball," he said.

Asked how Bangladesh had survived those testing opening spells, he pointed to a collective plan rather than personal instinct. "We tried to minimise our shots and focus on strike rotation. We avoided bad shots, and tried to build partnerships," he explained.

He also picked up on Smith's assessment from the opening day that the Darwin surface was a tricky one to bat on. "The new ball comes well on to the bat, but it does get tricky when the ball gets older," Tanzid said, though he still called it a genuinely good pitch, pointing to the later resistance shown by Hasan Mahmud and Mehidy Hasan Miraz as proof.

There was warmth, too, in how he described a Darwin crowd with no obvious reason to celebrate a Bangladeshi centurion. "The standing ovation is maybe the beauty of playing Test cricket in Australia," he said, a rare moment of reflection from a batter who had spent six hours refusing to think beyond the next ball.

Bangladesh closed the second day on 351 for 6, a lead of 153, built on Mominul's 49, Shanto's 84, a brisk 36 from Mushfiqur, and an unbroken resistance from Miraz and Hasan, Australia's chief tormentor with the ball, who dug in for close to 25 overs.

Australia have not won a Test after trailing by more than 100 runs on first innings in 16 years, and this Bangladesh side, no longer the pushover it once was on tours like this, will fancy its chances of stretching that wait even further.