This decision, announced after a meeting in Dhaka on Thursday between Bangladesh’s sports adviser Asif Nazrul, BCB president Aminul Islam and CEO Nizamuddin, and several national team players, means that they risk not participating in the tournament beginning on February 7. Nurul Hasan, Shamim Hossain, Hasan Mahmud, Najmul Hossain Shanto, Jaker Ali, Tanzid Hasan and Saif Hassan were among the cricketers present.
“We will go back to the ICC with our plan to play in Sri Lanka,” Aminul said at a press conference after the meeting. “They did give us a 24-hour ultimatum but a global body can’t really do that. ICC will miss out on 200 million people watching the World Cup. It will be their loss.”
Nazrul said: “We are hopeful that ICC will give us the opportunity to play in Sri Lanka. It is our government who has decided not to go to India.”
Bangladesh are currently in Group C along with England, Italy, West Indies and Nepal, and are scheduled to play their first three games in Kolkata and their last one in Mumbai. They play West Indies on February 7, the opening day of the tournament.
On Wednesday, after an ICC board meeting, the ICC had formally rejected Bangladesh’s request to play their matches in Sri Lanka instead of India on grounds of security.
The ICC, however, rejected the Mustafizur issue as a valid concern, saying the BCB was “repeatedly linking its participation in the tournament 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.”
