MUMBAI: The Asian Cricket Council (ACC) has moved the Under-19 Asia Cup out of India to Malaysia, with Kuala Lumpur replacing Bengaluru as host city for the tournament, which is to be held in November.
The decision was taken at the annual general meeting of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) held in Colombo on Saturday.
The event was moved to a neutral country after the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) objected to the tournament being held in India. The PCB had said it feared visa glitches as well as off field issues, given the prevailing political tensions between the two countries.
The Home Ministry, too, had been hesitant to clear BCCI’s request to host the event, given that the Pakistan team would have had to be assured participation. Sri Lanka were the tournament hosts last year.
Newly elected PCB chairman Najam Sethi told espncricinfo on Saturday, “The matter of shifting the tournament to Malaysia was amicably agreed by all participants in the development and executive committees, since no one wanted it marred by security considerations of any member.”
A related matter that came up for discussion at the AGM, meanwhile, was the Asia Cup 50-over tournament, which India is scheduled to host next June. Seeing as pretty much the same challenges would remain for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in terms of getting government clearances, the only viable proposition at this point would appear to be to also shift that tournament out of the country.
According to Mumbai Mirror, the BCCI has pushed for postponing the Asia Cup to September 2018. From this perch, such a proposal serves only to buy more time for the mandarins at the Indian cricket board to get the government on the same page on the vexed issue.
Mirror, however, has pointed to another matter which is of more serious concern to the ACC – the seven-year $85 million media rights agreement (MRA) signed in 2016 with Star India that covers four Asia Cup events. It does not take rocket science to deduce that should the next Asia Cup be moved out of India, the financials of the MRA would perforce have to be renegotiated downwards.
“We know that bilateral series (vs Pakistan) are not being permitted but there are precedents for multi-nation events. For example last year’s World Twenty20,” Mirror quotes an insider as having said. Be that as it may, considering the prevailing political realities that the ACC and BCCI are confronting, how much of the assertion is hope and how much is confidence that said precedent will apply in this case remains unclear.
