MELBOURNE: Cricket Australia (CA) on Wednesday announced that they wouldn’t be going ahead with hosting Bangladesh later this year due to financial reasons.
The CA believes that it isn’t practical for the tour to take place since the matches were to be held during the football season and the game is popular in places such as North Queensland and the Northern Territory, ESPNcricinfo reports. These two are the only places where the Bangladesh games could have been played.
According to the ICC’s Future Tours Program (FTP), Australia were to host Bangladesh for the first time since 2013, for 2 Tests and 3 ODIs in August and September. However, Australian free-to-air broadcasters are reportedly not keen to televise the series during the off season which prompted CA to take the decision.
James Sutherland, the CEO of Cricket Australia, opined that apart from India, England and South Africa, cricketing nations barely play them, particularly during the southern summer. As a result, the timing of the series isn’t appropriate.
“The way in which everything works in cricket is that it’s really at the home team’s discretion to work things out as to how much they want to host and what they want to host,” Sutherland told ESPNcricinfo.
“There’s obviously an element of reciprocity between what we do, we do that with England, India and South Africa.
“We commit to content in other parts of the world under the previous or current cycle, every six years you are at least committed to playing away, but we don’t have to play at home or we can vary the programme at home according to our needs and I think we just got squeezed a little bit.
“To be honest it hasn’t been a great success, playing in the past as we have in northern Australia. Even more so now with the rise of the profile of the football codes, particularly NRL and AFL, it just means we get swamped and it doesn’t make sense. Besides the huge cost to play up there and getting broadcasters and what have you to pick it up, just makes it difficult.”
However, Sutherland acknowledged that such a situation can’t occur when the Test Championship begins from mid-2019.
“If we get drawn to play [Bangladesh], and we’re drawn to play it at home, once you’re in a championship situation, the context puts you in a position of wanting to win every game and needing the points and not compromising. So you need to play at home and to try to win because those points count for something that at the end of the day might really matter to finishing one or two and qualifying for the final.”, he added.
