Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) is working hard to exit the hiatus forced by COVID-19 from March this year. Nazmul Hassan, the president of BCB, on Tuesday, said they are going to host a one-day league including the top cricketers of the country from 11 October.
This league will be another step of BCB to find a way out of COVID-19 which had forced a stop to all the cricketing activities in the country for more than four months.
After that, BCB arranged a team training camp comprising 27 players aiming to tour Sri Lanka for a three-match Test series. But the series has been postponed due to the COVID-19 restriction in the island nation.
The postponement of Sri Lanka tour prompted BCB to bring back domestic cricket, and Nazmul had said that they will host a number of domestic events so that they can open the deadlock created by COVID-19.
Now, after two phases of bio-secure training camp, BCB is all set to host a one-day league with three teams including the national team and high-performance team members.
“We are planning to resume domestic cricket. Before that, we’ll host a one-day league comprising three teams which will be led by Tamim Iqbal, Mahmudullah Riyad and Najmul Hossain Shanto. Mushfiqur supposed to lead one team, but he refused. We’ll try to include as many players as we can in this event,” Nazmul told the media on Tuesday.
“After this one-day league, we’ll arrange a competitive T20 league which might take place in mid-November. We will decide later whether it’ll be a corporate league or a league sponsored by BCB. We might include 75 local cricketers in this league, and we are also thinking to include foreign cricketers,” Nazmul added.
“We are working to bring cricket back in a safe and secure environment. So these are some experimental steps. I tried was about to enter the field today, but the players said they are in a bio-secure bubble so I can’t meet them. I was happy to see this. We have to practice this sort of things in the coming days. If our players get accustomed to this, the possibility of the tours of foreign teams will increase,” Nazmul further added.
Bangladesh played their last international game back in March this year against Zimbabwe. Since then, all the cricketers were out of action for a long time. However, the national team started playing cricket with two two-day practice games. Now, BCB is closer to exit the nightmarish COVID-19 situation.
