The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Wednesday announced that it would not be making any changes to the Men’s T20 World Cup schedule or groups, days after Bangladesh requested that its matches be moved to Sri Lanka after refusing to play in India.
Bangladesh announced on Jan 4 that it would not play its T20 World Cup matches in India after its player Mustafizur Rahman was released by his Indian Premier League (IPL) team amid growing tensions between the two countries. Subsequently, Bangladesh had “formally requested” the ICC to shift their games to Sri Lanka.
The T20 World Cup begins on February 7 with Bangladesh in England’s Group C. The team is scheduled to play all of their group matches in Kolkata and Mumbai.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the ICC said the decision was reached after “considering all security assessments conducted, including independent reviews, all of which indicated there was no threat to Bangladesh players, media persons, officials and fans at any tournament venues in the country”.
“It was noted that it was not feasible to make changes so close to the tournament and that altering the schedule under the circumstances, in the absence of any credible security threat, could set a precedent that would jeopardise the sanctity of future ICC events and undermine its neutrality as a global governing body,” the statement added.
According to the statement, an ICC spokesperson said that the governing body had engaged the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) for the past few weeks with the “clear objective of enabling Bangladesh’s participation in the tournament”.
But that despite these efforts, the BCB repeatedly linked its participation “to a single, isolated and unrelated development concerning one of its player’s involvement in a domestic league”.
“This linkage has no bearing on the tournament’s security framework or the conditions governing participation in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup,” it said.
Separately, Cricinfo reported that the ICC had given the BCB one more day to confer with the Bangladesh government about whether its team would travel to India.
Should they continue to refuse, the ICC Board will replace Bangladesh with Scotland in the tournament, based on team rankings, the report said.
Late on Tuesday night, the Bangladesh government’s sports adviser Asif Nazrul had reiterated that under no condition would the national team travel to India for the World Cup.
“If the ICC bows to pressure from the Indian cricket board and tries to impose pressure on us by setting unreasonable conditions, we will not accept those conditions,” Nazrul had told reporters, according to the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency.
“In the past, there are examples that Pakistan said that they will not travel to India and ICC changed the venue. We have asked to change the venue on logical ground and we cannot be pressurised to play in India by putting illogical pressure.”
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