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Mohammad IsamESPN
From being a “mess” in 2012, the Bangladesh Premier League is now entering its fifth season as a slowly developing tournament. Shifting the focus of the league has helped resolve most of the fundamental problems and paved the way for a new direction, according to BPL secretary Ismail Haider Mallick.
Mallick said settling player payments, putting profit-making on the back seat, and setting up BCB’s own anti-corruption unit has contributed to the progress of the league.
“I will credit the board for the time for starting the tournament but the first edition was a mess,” Mallick said. “We needed the whole of the second edition and the subsequent year to put things in order. There were players’ payment troubles. We didn’t have any documentation with franchise owners. So we wanted the tournament to be a sustained effort, by making sure the players were given financial security. We can now say that we are running it on a professional structure.
“We wanted sports lovers as franchise owners, not those who are looking to do business. It was an unrealistic goal to pitch this as a Tk 100 crore tournament. The Bangladesh market isn’t that big so we had to readjust their approach. We wanted to make sure that the board, players and the franchise would make some money.”
Those intentions have been visible with a number of defaulting franchises being removed, Barisal Bulls being the most recent one after they had failed to provide bank guarantees.
Mallick cited Barisal’s example of a franchise they let go for financial discrepancies, pointing at how they didn’t spare a team which had MA Awwal Chowdhury, the former BCB director (from 2013 to 2017), as a co-owner in 2015 and 2016. “The owners of the first edition weren’t sports lovers. In Bangladesh, sport runs on donations. Outsiders bring fixing and indiscipline.
“Having owners who are also in the board helps the discipline,” Mallick said. “They don’t get any extra benefit. Barisal Bulls is a great example. They are very close to us. I helped him raise money for his team but when they couldn’t give us a bank guarantee, we had to let them go.”
However, he refrained from mentioning his and the BCB president’s employers, Beximco Group, which also owns Dhaka Dynamites, and BCB director Kazi Inam Ahmed-owned team Khulna Titans – both of which could possibly be a conflict of interest issue.
Keeping corruption at bay is one of the key concerns, particularly after Dhaka Gladiators and Mohammad Ashraful were banned for their involvement in such practices 2013. “Our board president told us that we should have the system in place to tackle anti-corruption,” he said .”We had to focus on anti-corruption after the first edition, and we spent around Tk 5 crore by hiring the entire ICC anti-corruption team.
“We wanted the tribunal in 2013, before holding the next event, so we skipped the tournament in 2014.”
Mallick said that they will consider holding home and away matches, in a bid to expand the league across the country. “We want to spread the tournament across Bangladesh. In the future, we will be very happy if we can have home and away matches.”
“BPL is growing slowly but going through a bigger hype,” Mallick said. “We know our strengths and weaknesses. Our policies are clicking. We aren’t too ambitious.”
Source: ESPN Crickinfo