A Name in the Notebook: What Stopped on the Road from Feni to Dhaka

Hook

I never stood on that field in Feni, yet one evening it felt as though I were standing there. The news came from Chattogram, then from Dhaka — a boy from the Chattogram Division under-18 side, Mehedi Hasan Hridoy, was gone. Blood and bone-marrow cancer, acute myeloid leukaemia. He died on the road to Dhaka, while being taken for advanced treatment.

I opened my notebook in my Rajshahi room. For twenty years I have written cricket names in this notebook — who played where, who went to one knee on which ground, whose father stood in which corner of the gallery wiping his eyes. I had never written Hridoy's name before. Today I wrote it for the first time, and immediately understood: I am writing this name not because he won, but because he never arrived. That is the real story, and it is the one we usually avoid writing.

In the under-18 and under-16 matches I have watched in Chattogram over the years, almost every one had a boy who looked at the gallery a little longer than the rest — as though searching for who was watching him. Hridoy must have looked too. How many of us looked back?

Context

Bangladesh's age-group structure needs explaining, because this is really the story of that structure. Seven divisional teams — Dhaka, Chattogram, Rajshahi, Khulna, Barishal, Sylhet, Rangpur. Below them districts, below them upazilas. Under-18, under-16, under-14. Thousands of boys at every step, and a filter at every step.

Hridoy was one of the Chattogram Division under-18 side. Meaning: a name standing at the very edge of the second floor of our cricket pyramid. No national youth team, no High Performance Unit, no first-class contract, no franchise. That floor is not a market of lakhs of taka — it is only a place of possibility, and boys on that floor live outside the cricket economy, and therefore outside cricket's protection too.

— Roots: Rajshahi Kings. In 2026, when I spent six weeks with Rajshahi Kings, I learned one thing: talent and protection do not arrive together. That season of the BPL, when 17-year-old Afif Hossain struck 45 off 28 against Khulna Titans, the Kings' Facebook group added 3,200 comments in two hours. I read all of them. But in the same period I noticed that an almost anonymous boy in that squad had his knee treated out of the players' own pockets. No chair in the physio room, no birthday cake on tour. That boy lying on the physio table that day was never asked his name either.

Feni is a real place on our sporting map. Football, cricket, athletics all live here. In mofussil sporting culture, district organisers do work that never reaches the media: they buy boys' shoes, pay bus fares, raise tournament money from neighbourhood shops. When Hridoy fell ill, that same network activated — Feni's sports organisers provided financial support. Who they were, how much they gave, is not detailed in the report. It is hard to detail, because in the mofussil help travels by word of mouth, not by ledger.

Core

Now the numbers, the coldest and most necessary facts in this story. The Ministry of Youth and Sports gave five lakh taka. The Bangladesh Cricket Board gave five lakh taka. Together, ten lakh. Plus unspecified support from Feni's local sports organisers.

One thing must be settled first: these are not contract fees, not market value, not salary. They are money raised for treatment. Any analysis that reads this ten lakh as Hridoy's 'price' would be entirely wrong. The question is the reverse: a full AML pathway means several chemotherapy cycles, supportive care, infection management, and in many cases a stem-cell transplant — often performed abroad. Treatment costs for blood and bone-marrow cancer vary by country, and I do not have reliable aggregate data on Bangladeshi hospital tariffs — I will not guess here. But this much can be said: five lakh plus five lakh is a large sum, and it is almost always half the road.

The sentence in the report that stays quietest is this: 'death while being taken to Dhaka for advanced treatment.' Inside that sentence is structural information. Care had started outside Dhaka, and the capacity there had run out — that is why the patient was being transferred. That is the tertiary-referral gap. The road from mofussil to Dhaka is not only geographic distance; it is distance in time, and in blood cancer, time is the medicine.

I am pained to write this, but I must be honest: Mehedi Hasan Hridoy was an uncontracted, age-group, pathway cricketer. His cricket career has no statistics in the report — no runs, no wickets, no tournament name. From this silence an inference is possible: his sporting record was local and modest, with no nationally noted achievement. And this is exactly where we must face our own self-deception. 'Promising young cricketer' is not a selector's assessment; it is mourning language.

— Roots: Russia 2026 and the Japanese Clean-Up. In 2026 I was at the Russia World Cup, in Moscow and Rostov-on-Don. I followed Japan's fans for eleven days. After their 3-2 round-of-16 loss to Belgium, I watched two hundred Japanese supporters clean their section for twenty minutes. I interviewed fourteen of them. I learned something about journalism that day: emotion is not only colour, emotion is structure. How a society carries its duty to its most vulnerable members is its true identity.

In Bangladesh, who carries that duty? In this case help came through three separate windows: the ministry, the board, and local organisers. All three independent, all three separate decisions, all three well-intentioned. But none of them a standing system. If someone asks — for a registered under-18 player who falls seriously ill, whose responsibility is treatment, under which policy — this report has no answer. In a report where every taka's source is itemised, there is no mention of an insurance claim, a player welfare fund, or a board medical scheme. That absence is information.

— Roots: Empty Stadiums in Dhaka and the Mohammedan SC Salary Fund. In 2026, aged forty-six, I stayed in Dhaka with Mohammedan Sporting Club for forty-two days, while the BPL was suspended after six rounds. Twenty-eight players and staff faced fifty per cent salary cuts. I organised a Facebook fundraiser with fan groups in Rajshahi and Chattogram. We raised 1.2 million BDT. I delivered the first envelopes myself. That day I learned two names: charity and entitlement. When I put the envelope in a man's hand, there was gratitude in his eyes — and in that gratitude there was also anger, because he knew it was owed to him, not granted.

From that experience I built a habit: I keep WhatsApp groups with players' families, and before writing I ask — what does the group need? I do not know Hridoy's family, I have not contacted them. But I know what state that family is in now. The report says Hridoy was the only son, the elder of two children, with one younger sister. In a family where the only son undergoes a long cancer treatment, the financial damage does not end when treatment ends. The ministry's five lakh, the board's five lakh, the locals' support — these are help, but this grateful truth must also be said: this kind of cost leaves a single-income household permanently financially insecure.

The stadium. Our ground is not only a place of play, it is a living archive. At the Rajshahi venue I have seen the same people from the vendors outside the gate to the pavilion for twenty years. That ground teaches us continuity. But outside the ground, there is no continuity. If an under-18 boy plays well, the gallery claps; if he falls ill, help money is raised after the news is published. Between those two moments lies the real gap.

Contrarian

A counter-intuitive angle is needed here, because sympathy is understandable but must still carry the marks of argument.

First, anyone who reads this report and thinks Bangladesh cricket lost a promising star is right in feeling, wrong in fact. How good a cricketer Hridoy was — that question is simply absent from the report. The word 'promising' came from a district councillor's condolence message, and then rose to the headline. No selector, no coach, no scout gave any assessment of his cricketing ability. Making a dead teenager a star in retrospection feels compassionate, but it is not the duty of journalism — and not right now.

Second, in stories of endangered players we usually take pride in the amount of help and do not question the entitlement. The ministry's five lakh, the board's five lakh — both are correctly cited, and there is no reason to doubt the goodwill of those who gave. But the journalist's job is not praise, it is questions. If someone could state on the record — 'a player welfare fund exists, Hridoy's name was on the list, there was no hardship' — the story would be written differently.

Third, this report is itself an institution-friendly document. The source is the board, the description of the ministry's cheque handover, and the district councillor's condolence. No party attacks anyone, no one asks why treatment had to be moved out of the country, why Chattogram could not wait. It can be read as a story of protecting the board's reputation, and as a story of human kindness. Both are true.

And fourth, one statistic: not only in Bangladesh but across the whole South Asian cricket landscape, the main way treatment costs are met is personal collection, and that collection happens only after a name reaches the newspapers. Those whose names do not reach — the young man playing in Feni, Satkhira or Thakurgaon who suddenly falls ill — their number is unknown to any of us. That silent number is both the smallest and the largest fact in this story.

Takeaway

I closed the notebook in the evening. Beside Hridoy's name I wrote — 2026, Feni. The date is reported as Saturday, 24 October, but the year is not clear. I am not guessing, but this much I will say: 24 October fell on a Saturday in 2026, 2026 and 2026. 2026 is still in the future, so 2026 is the plausible year, but it needs verification — and there is one route to verify, by finding in the record the named minister and the 2 July cheque handover.

My question is not about the ending of one good boy's story. My question is about the next boy, who may be bowling in a Feni net right now, who thinks he has a secret variation in his left-arm spin nobody has caught, who does not know whether his name will ever appear in a Dhaka newspaper.

I remember that Rajshahi evening, when I saw the unnamed boy in the physio room. Today I am thinking of the unnamed boy in Feni. The better our cricket's bowling averages become, the better. But that is not the question of the hour today. Today's question is: can we one day build a system where no under-18 boy waits on treatment, even if his name never reaches a Dhaka newspaper? We have not answered that today. Perhaps a generation will remember us for that question, and not for the boy — whose statistics we will never be able to write.