Former BCCI Selector Kishan Rungta Dies Due To COVID-19 In Jaipur

Kishan Rungta, a former Rajasthan captain and BCCI selector, passed away on Saturday, a week after testing positive for the covid-19. He breathed his last at a hospital in Jaipur.

Born on September 3, 1932, in Bagar, Rajasthan, Kishan Rungta played 59 First-Class matches for Maharashtra and Rajasthan from 1953 to 1970. He scored 2717 runs at an average of 32.73 with 5 hundreds, and picked 9 wickets, with a best of 5/14, with his right-arm medium pace.

Kishan Rungta, 88, served as the BCCI national selector from Central Zone from March 1998 to September 1998. His late elder brother Purushottam was a BCCI treasurer in the 1970s; Purushottam’s son Kishore held the same position in the early 2000s.

“Former Rajasthan first class cricketer and ex-national selector Kishan Rungta has died of COVID-19,” a BCCI source confirmed to PTI.

The Rungta family dominated Rajasthan cricket for nearly five decades before Lalit Modi beat them in the elections and took control in the mid-2000s.

BCCI keeping UAE as a backup option for T20 World Cup

Speaking of the BCCI, the governing body has kept UAE as a backup venue for the “worst-case scenario” to move the T20 World Cup considering the covid situation in India. The covid cases have been rising at the rate of knots in the country, with over 300,000 cases and more than 2000 deaths per day recorded for the last week.

Dhiraj Malhotra, the tournament director for the T20 World Cup, has said that they are observing the unfolding of covid-19 in India and will wait for some time to take the final call.

The BCCI has plans to take the T20 World Cup to the UAE as a contingency measure if the ICC found India to be unsafe, but they will still keep hold of their hosting rights.

The board remains positive to conduct the tournament in India and has already proposed to the ICC nine venues to stage the T20 World Cup: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Dharamsala, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Mumbai.

“I hope so. I am doing everything we can to make sure that it happens. We will be doing normal scenario, Covid-scenario, worst case scenario. All that we are in talks with the ICC at the moment,” Malhotra said on the BBC’s Stumped podcast this week.

“It would be (the) UAE. And we are hoping it will again be done by BCCI – we will take the tournament there. So it will be still run by BCCI,” he added.

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