Nigar Sultana quit the T20I captaincy by email from Japan, and the BCB says it is embarrassed
Bangladesh’s captain told her board mid-tournament that the shortest format is someone else’s job from October. She keeps the 50-over side.
Sep 17, 2026
The email arrived from Japan. Nigar Sultana Joty, in Aichi with the Bangladesh squad for the Asian Games, wrote to her own board on 15 September to say she does not want the T20I captaincy once the tournament is over.
She keeps the ODI job, which she has held since 2021. The T20I side, which she has led since 2022, will need someone else from October.
She went before the review did
Bangladesh had already said her captaincy would be looked at after the Asian Games. That was the board’s line last weekend, when it was busy distancing itself from her decision not to shake Harmanpreet Kaur’s hand at the toss of the Women’s Asia Cup semi-final on 10 September, a match Bangladesh lost by 40 runs.
So the review was coming. Joty got there first, and Mirpur has not enjoyed the sequence. Rafiqul Islam Babu, who chairs the BCB’s women’s wing, was unusually candid about it.
“Since the Asian Games is currently taking place, her decision to step down during the tournament has left us somewhat embarrassed,” Babu said.
“We received an email stating she will not continue as T20I captain after the Asian Games,” he added. “She will continue as captain in the 50-over format.”
Her own explanation is about workload. She keeps wicket, she bats in the top order, and she has carried the third job on top of those two for four years. A team management source told The Daily Star that the scrutiny had been heavy and that stepping away was probably the sensible call.
Eighty matches, and one afternoon in Sharjah
Joty has captained Bangladesh in 80 T20Is and won 32 of them. She passed Salma Khatun’s 65 matches to become the most-used captain Bangladesh’s women’s team has had, which says as much about how long she has been doing it as about how it has gone.
The afternoon she will be remembered for came at Sharjah on 3 October 2024, when Bangladesh beat Scotland by 16 runs in the opening match of the T20 World Cup. It was their first win at a World Cup in ten years. Joty made 104 runs across four innings in that campaign and took seven dismissals behind the stumps.
A farewell that began with no cricket at all
Her last assignment in the job started on Thursday with a wet outfield and no toss. Bangladesh were down to play China in the first quarter-final at Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin, the umpires inspected three times after the rain stopped, and the match was abandoned without a ball bowled.
Bangladesh went through anyway. When a knockout match is abandoned here the higher seed advances, and Bangladesh sit 10th in the T20I rankings to China’s 36th. It is a straight eight-team knockout, so the semi-finals on 20 September and the two medal matches on 22 September are all that is left of it.
That leaves Joty two matches in the job, weather permitting: the semi-final on Sunday and a medal match on Tuesday. A tenure that started in 2022 ends on a small ground in Aichi, and the first day of it produced no cricket.
Nobody has been named yet
The BCB has not said who takes over, and it does not have to this week. Given how the past fortnight has gone, waiting until the squad is home looks like the likelier route. Whoever gets the job inherits a side that has spent a decade being told it is close.