Bangladesh Cricket Board President Nazmul Hasan flew to London yesterday to attend the week-long ICC Annual General Meeting beginning at Lord’s tomorrow.
Among many agendas, the BCB boss will be keen to get hold of the spot-fixing report from ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (Acsu).Nazmul might have to answer for the delayed BCB election process and talks of shifting the men’s and women’s World T20 from Bangladesh next year might also come up.
Acsu’s investigations into possible fixing practices in certain matches of the second season Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) unveiled many names tagged with the wrong-doings, with suspended national cricketer Mohammad Ashraful’s confession to being involved in spot fixing being the key incident in the whole saga.
The controversial issue received extensive media coverage for over a week and Acsu’s final report has been highly awaited. Speculation as to when the report would be submitted was ended when Nazmul confirmed that he would receive the final document at the ICC AGM tomorrow.
Election and DPL
The last scheduled meeting between BCB president and the Dhaka Premier League club officials on June 22 was postponed as the Nazmul had declared recently that the league could start only after the report from Acsu is received.
Earlier, Nazmul had set the players transfer date for June 23 and the league for June 3. Last Friday, however, the BCB announced that the dates had been pushed back due to unavoidable reasons. It was said that the Acsu report will lay a huge blow on Bangladesh cricket, after which, deep cleansing will be needed before things can return to normal.
The ad-hoc committee that took charge last November were supposed to hold an election in three months. Later, the 2012 constitution that was implemented by the National Sports Council faced objections and matters were taken to court. According to the BCB, polls can only take place once the matter out of court.
This led to speculation as to whether the BCB ad-hoc would be allowed to attend the AGM. It was said that only an elected board would be allowed to attend, though the ad-hoc committee denied this.
It was also said that Bangladesh might lose their associate-membership and further speculation centered on the ICC Twenty20 World Cup 2014 possibly being moved from Bangladesh due to the slow progress in getting venues ready.
