The schedule of the ICC ODI World Cup 2023 has been announced recently by the ICC and it also heated up the political atmosphere of the country.
The ODI World Cup will start from 5 October 2023 in which 10 teams will contest against each other in the matches that will be played at 10 venues of the country. The opening match of the tournament will be played between New Zealand and England at Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad, and the final match of the tournament (19 Nov) will also be played at the same venue.
While the semi-finals will be hosted at Mumbai and Kolkata, India will play its first match against Australia at Chennai and the important match of arch-rivals, India and Pakistan will be played on 15 October at Narendra Modi Stadium. The other 6 venues at which the matches will be played are – Lucknow, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Dharamsala and Bengaluru.
With this, some major cities such as Indore, Rajkot, Mohali, Nagpur, etc. which have been organizing international matches for quite a long time, especially the World Cup matches, have missed the opportunity to host the matches of the World Cup 2023 and this has left some officials and politicians angry.
The President of Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association, Abhilash Khandekar has expressed his disappointment as he says that they don’t know compulsions of the BCCI but Indore has a rich cricketing history, it also hosted a World Cup between Australia and New Zealand in 1987 and they certainly felt very bad after being left out as they expected to be a venue of the World Cup 2023.
An official of Punjab Cricket Association was also quite unhappy after Mohali didn’t get a match despite the fact that in the 2011 World Cup, it hosted the big match between India and Pakistan and it has been hosting WC matches since 1996.
Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, the sports minister of Punjab, alleges that politics is being played in deciding the venues by citing that Narendra Modi Stadium is not only hosting the opening match, the final but also the match between India and Pakistan but Punjab didn’t get even one match. He further said that the stadium which used to be among the top five venues of the country didn’t get a single match but Dharamsala has got five matches.
What do you think of these allegations? Do let us know.