The Asia Cup’s final five games will be played in Colombo as scheduled, despite the PCB’s reluctance. This is true despite the Pakistan board fiercely objecting to the decision made by the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) to keep the games in Colombo rather than move them to Hambantota.
The PCB had agreed to the plans to transfer the Colombo matches to Hambantota since rain was predicted for Colombo over the next ten days; it is believed that the department of meteorology in Sri Lanka provided this information. The ACC appeared to be working toward an agreement that the games would go to Hambantota on Monday night and Tuesday morning.
But on Tuesday at noon, the ACC sent an email to the interested parties announcing that the matches would take place in Colombo as originally planned. The PCB executives were furious about this because they were hosting the tournament and would have wanted for the matches to be played in Hambantota. They were also concerned that the ACC had taken this decision without properly informing them.
In response, the PCB demanded an emergency meeting of the ACC executive board and wrote to ACC president Jay Shah to express its displeasure with the organization’s decision-making procedures. However, the PCB is currently powerless to do much more than withdraw from the competition. The PCB doesn’t seem poised to take a severe action, despite being extremely upset by the events of Tuesday.
Shah addressed the tournament’s schedule in a statement he sent on Tuesday afternoon in his capacity as ACC president.
In this statement, Shah said that “all the full members, media rights holder, and in-stadia rights holders were initially reluctant to commit to hosting the entire tournament in Pakistan.” “This reluctance was caused by worries about the country’s current economic and security situation.”
However, since 2019, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have made bilateral trips to Pakistan and have also competed there in the present Asia Cup’s group stage. Both neither team nor its boards have openly stated that they would prefer not to send teams to Pakistan. In reality, the governor of (Pakistani) Punjab hosted two BCCI executives on their two-day tour to Lahore: vice-president Rajeev Shukla and board president Roger Binny.
The BCCI declined on the grounds that their government would not permit the team to go to Pakistan, despite the PCB’s initial request for the entire tournament to be played in Pakistan. The majority of the competition was then moved to Sri Lanka.
This appeared to be a reasonable compromise, but the Saturday rainout of the Pakistan vs. India game at Pallekele raised concerns that the weather might have a significant impact on the entire event.
In any case, the SLC is happy that the tournament will remain in Colombo and has always favored that it be held there because it is the city with the simplest logistics for hosting a multi-team tournament. One of the reasons the ACC opted to keep the games in Colombo was because “a lot of fans had already made arrangements to watch the matches in Colombo” and because “the last few days it hasn’t been raining as much” in the city, SLC Chief Executive Ashley de Silva told ESPNcricinfo on Tuesday.
He also mentioned Sri Lanka’s generally positive track record of hosting ODIs. 79 of the 84 men’s ODI matches played during the past ten years have been completed. The game on Saturday was the only one of the five games that was abandoned in September, a month that typically isn’t particularly rainy.
Jay Shah cites “several changes” in PCB as the cause of the confusion.
Additionally, Shah stated in his statement, “As President of the ACC, I was dedicated to identifying a workable and amicable resolution. In order to do this, I had agreed to the hybrid approach that the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), in coordination with the ACC management, had suggested. However, it’s necessary to remember that the PCB’s leadership experienced a number of changes, which led to some back-and-forth negotiations, notably regarding crucial issues like tax exemption and match insurance.
Shah said that there was a difference between playing 20-over games and 50-over games in the UAE in September in response to early PCB requests that the tournament be played in Pakistan and the UAE, which were repeated in recent days due to the weather in Sri Lanka.
“The T20 format was used in the UAE during the Asia Cup 2022. To be clear, a T20 tournament’s dynamics cannot be directly equated to those of a 100-over One-day format. Concerns regarding playing One-Day matches in the UAE in September were raised by the high-performance teams of the ACC members in this situation. Such a schedule would have raised player tiredness and injury risk, especially in the weeks leading up to the crucial ICC Cricket World Cup.
“A real commitment to put player welfare and the larger interests of the sport first informed the decision-making process for the Asia Cup 2023 format and location. The ultimate objective was to create a compromise between maintaining the teams’ health and readiness for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2023 and allowing for a competitive and successful event.