‘Politics is being played,’ says BCCI as venues that hosted the IND-PAK World Cup semifinal in 2011 fail to qualify for 2023. With 100 days until the start of the event, the International Cricket Council (ICC) on Tuesday unveiled the much anticipated itinerary for the 2023 Men’s ODI Cricket World Cup.
The competition will begin on October 5 and culminate on November 19 at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium, with the semifinal matches taking place in Mumbai and Kolkata on November 15 and 16, respectively.
The World Cup will be the largest ICC event in history because to the use of ten sites overall. The other seven cities are Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Dharamsala, Hyderabad, Lucknow, and Pune in addition to the aforementioned ones.
Typically, the metro areas are chosen to host a World Cup game, but zone-based allocation is also used. And despite the fact that it is an ICC tournament, the local organising committee—in this case, BCCI—suggestions are frequently preferred. While some significant locations have been added for the 2023 World Cup, some significant towns, like Mohali, Indore, Rajkot, Ranchi, and Nagpur, have been left out, disappointing the officials of these venues.
The Holkar Stadium in Indore has frequently hosted international competitions of many kinds. In the most recent test of the Border-Gavaskar Test series, it had held a match. Abhilash Khandekar, president of the Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association, is sad that it missed a World Cup match.
“In 1987, Indore served as the site of an Australia-New Zealand World Cup match. We regret that Indore was excluded. I am not aware of the BCCI’s requirements. Since Indore has a long history of cricket, we anticipated it will host the World Cup, Khandekar said PTI.
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Another significant location that was denied a World Cup match was Mohali, which hosted the thrilling semifinal match between Pakistan and India in the previous tournament. In reality, it has been the site of World Cup games since 1996.
In fact, Mohali’s exclusion from the match, according to Punjab’s Minister of Sports Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, was a very political choice.
“It’s great that the World Cup is coming to India, but it’s terrible that there won’t be a single game in a stadium that has produced many Indian cricketing heroes and was once among the top five venues in the nation. The opening game, the championship game, and the pivotal match between India and Pakistan, on the other hand, are all taking place in the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. You also give Dharamsala, an adjacent city, five games, but Punjab does not receive even one. That proves that politics is being played,” he said.
