The ongoing worldwide inflation is having its impact on even the governing body of the country’s richest sport – Bangladesh Cricket Board.
BCB president Nazmul Hasan following a board meeting at Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium in Mirpur Thursday revealed that the board has decided to cut costs starting with Bangladesh cricket team’s tour of the West Indies.
The BCB is likely to declare revised squads for the tour of the Caribbean islands.
The board in the meeting also decided to extend contract of the members of the national selection panel till the ODI World Cup 2023.
The current selection panel comprises chief selector Minhajul Abedin, Habibul Bashar and Abdur Razzak.
Nazmul informed that the BCB cricket operations committee has already been instructed to shred the number of members for the tour of the Caribbean.
Alongside, all the departments in the board have been asked to work on minimizing expenses.
“The costs of almost everything have gone drastically high. The [flight] ticket which used to cost Tk3 to 4 lakhs now costs around Tk10 lakhs. Hotel rent which once used to be $250 is now $400 to 500,” said Nazmul.
“This is a big issue to be honest, for which we in the meeting [Thursday] have decided to work on cutting costs. We cannot send the teams the way it was before. Now the Covid-19 situation has improved worldwide so there is no need of sending extra players and officials.
“We want to start on this with the West Indies series. We will look who doesn’t need to go there which means there might be a change in the squads which we have already announced but this is not confirmed yet.”
The board in the meeting along with extending tenure of the national selection panel has decided to add two more members, given the packed cricket schedule.
“We had asked the cricket operations to suggest us new names for the national selection panel. They couldn’t do that. We couldn’t find any new names for this job. Cricket operations advised the board to extend the tenure of the current selection panel and that they will work on finding new names by this time,” Nazmul informed.
“So alongside extending the contract [till 2023 World Cup with the current selection panel] we have decided to add two more members to the panel. This is because given the packed cricket schedule it becomes tough for the three current selectors to cover everything,” the BCB boss added.
