Mustafizur Rahman in full flow © Getty Images
Bangladesh’s scheduled tour of Sri Lanka at the end of July will go ahead as planned, Sri Lanka Cricket announced with a statement on Monday.
The confirmation had been on hold since May, when, in the wake of the terror attacks across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday the previous month, the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) had said that it would need to monitor the security situation before taking a decision.
“We are concerned about the scenario,” BCB chief executive Nizam Chowdhury had said on May 7. “We will take advice from our foreign ministry and the Bangladesh High Commission in Sri Lanka.
“We are also likely to hold talks with the SLC during the Asian Cricket Council meeting later this month.”
The decision to go ahead with the tour is likely to have been taken after a great deal of thought on the part of the BCB, given the terror attacks in Christchurch in March, where some Bangladesh players had come perilously close to being caught in the middle of a shooting incident. That tour of New Zealand had been immediately called off with two matches still to play. It is understood that the BCB has assessed security risks ahead of this tour and the close monitoring is what caused the delay in the confirmation.
The tour will comprise three ODIs, the first on July 26, instead of the original date of July 25. The following two ODIs will now be played on July 28 and July 31 respectively, before Bangladesh depart on August 1. All three ODIs are day-night fixtures and will take place in Colombo.
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Source: ESPN Crickinfo