Bangladesh's Sri Lanka tour postponed indefinitely
After lots of back-and-forth between the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) and the Sri Lanka Cricket Board (SLC) an agreement could not be reached to let the tour go ahead as scheduled.
It's official! The Bangladesh tour of Sri Lanka has finally been postponed.
After lots of back-and-forth between the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) and the Sri Lanka Cricket Board (SLC) an agreement could not be reached to let the tour go ahead as scheduled.
BCB president Nazmul Hassan informed this news to the media on Monday.
The conditions that SLC had proposed to the BCB for the upcoming tour were not possible to comply with according to the BCB chief.
He informed that the BCB had agreed with all the guidelines the SLC proposed and vice versa barring one - the 14-day quarantine period for the Bangladesh cricketers in Sri Lanka.
BCB wanted to have a seven-day quarantine period in Sri Lanka but the Sri Lankan health ministry made it mandatory for visitors from other countries to follow a 14-day quarantine.
SLC spoke to their healthy ministry to try and decrease the quarantine period for the visiting Bangladesh players to no avail.
As a result of which, the series will not move forward and BCB has informed SCL to come up with a new itinerary for the tour.
"It won't be possible for us to play in the Test Championship under the guidelines that they (SLC) have proposed. Still, their cricket board and health ministry tried. We gave our minimum requisites for us to tour and they agreed with all of them apart from the most important one - the 14-day quarantine period," Nazmul said.
The BCB president feels that the quarantine period the SLC are asking for feels more like an isolation period.
"To us, there is a difference between quarantine and isolation. If we consider it to be a home quarantine, then one cannot get out of their house. But if we think about the isolation of a Covid positive patient, then that person cannot get out his/her room. In Sri Lanka, it's isolation in one's room, which they are referring to as quarantine," Nazmul said
Nazmul also cited how quarantine is different in other countries compared to Sri Lanka: "In other countries, this is not quarantine. This is complete isolation. And what SLC are imposing is one where you cannot get out of your room under any circumstance."
The BCB chief expressed that such a quarantine would affect the fitness of the players and be detrimental to their mental state: "If one stays in isolation like this for 14 days, it will have negative effects on one's fitness and also one's mental health. It will take them a while to get back to normal and in that state, it won't be possible for that cricketer to play. We have already informed this previously."
"The rules are the same for everyone that is visiting Sri Lanka as a tourist and not just the Bangladesh cricket team. That is their law. We received this information yesterday and we informed them today that it won't be possible for us to tour there for a series," Nazmul said.
Bangladesh were scheduled to tour Sri Lanka for three Tests and the first Test was set to begin on October 24.
But due to a disagreement over the quarantine period, the tour has been postponed with talks yet to begin over when the series can be rescheduled.