The Indian cricket team is set to fly off to the United Kingdom for the upcoming ICC World Test Championship (WTC) final in Southampton, followed by a 5-match Test series against England.
The Board of Cricket for Control in India (BCCI) recently announced a limited-over series against Sri Lanka in July. Since the Indian team would be in England, the BCCI is set to send a parallel group to Sri Lanka.
Arun Dhumal, BCCI treasurer, in a conversation with Sportskeeda, revealed why the board went ahead with Sri Lanka tour when one team will be playing overseas in the UK.
“See as you know the cricket world is under tremendous pressure for the last one-and-a-half year given this COVID pandemic, lot of FTP has been cancelled which has put lot of strains on these associations all over the world. Until and unless you do these tours, we can’t make up, and it would be very difficult for all these boards to come out of their financial struggle that they are going through,” explained Dhumal.
India tour to the Island Nation was initially planned for the year 2020 but was cancelled due to the outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide.
Dhumal further stated that India has excellent bench strength, which gives them the flexibility to consider two tours simultaneously. He asserted that it is important for the teams to follow such a policy in future.
“We had to miss Sri Lanka tour last year also. So, we need to work out on that and since our team that is going to England is primarily for Tests, we could have made up a team for these white-ball matches. So, that is why we thought we should do our bit to make sure Sri Lankan board and we can play white-ball cricket in time,” the BCCI treasurer added.
India is scheduled to play 3 One Day Internationals (ODI) and 3 T20Is starting 13th of July.
