Bangladesh Premier League (BPL 2022) To Be Played Behind Closed Doors

The upcoming Bangladesh Premier League (BPL 2022) will be played behind closed doors, the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) informed on Saturday, January 15. The tournament is slated to begin on January 15, Friday and the BCB took the call keeping in mind the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus is affecting a new wave of the pandemic which has engulfed the majority of countries that are registering a record number of cases per day. This led to the majority of matches like the South Africa-India tour being played without the crowd.

Though the Bangladesh Cricket Board had recently allowed crowds in Dhaka and Chattogram when the Tigers locked horns with Pakistan in a bilateral Test and T20I series, they have decided to not risk their premier T20 tournament and banned the crowds in for the whole BPL 2022 edition.

Ismail Haider Mallick, the governing council secretary of the BPL, revealed that fans won’t be there at the venues during the BPL as per directives from the government.

“There will be no fans allowed inside the stadium during the upcoming BPL. This is the directives given by the government and we are following it,” Mallick was quoted as saying on Cricbuzz.

No DRS To Be Used In BPL 2022: BCB

Apart from this, the BPL 2022 will not have the Decision Review System (DRS) technology since the board couldn’t bring in technicians from abroad due to the pandemic. The T20 league will see a foreign umpire and a local umpire officiating in the matches.

“We cannot use the DRS in BPL due to the Covid situation. Now they (technicians) can’t fly. Their two teams are now in two countries, they will not be able to come to Bangladesh in this situation from there. Hawk-Eye Company is the sole provider of DRS in the world. No one wants to come because of Omicron,” he stated.

“There is nothing to discuss with the franchises about DRS. We did not get DRS and we will let them know. It’s true that the tournament might lose some of its appeal without DRS but there is nothing to do. We wanted full capacity of crowds in BPL. We also got permission from the government but everything changed because of Omicron,” Mallick added.

Chattogram Challengers and Fortune Barishal will clash in the opening match of the BPL 2022 and in the second match on the same day, Dhaka Platoon and Khulna Tigers will also lock horns.

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