The cricket World Cup is going on in full flow in England and Wales. Every team has played at least one match except for India. A few have even played their third. The one question on most of the Indian cricket fans’ minds is: Why India are playing their first World Cup match so late, almost six days after the start of the event? It is a valid and justifiable question as India’s opponents in their opener, South Africa, will be playing their third game of the tournament.
India played their final warm-up game on May 28 and have not played for the last week. They were busy ironing out their flaws in the last-minute preparations.
According to reports, India was supposed to play their first World Cup match on June 2 against South Africa but the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) asked the International Cricket Council (ICC) to make the necessary changes in the schedule. The change was necessitated in the wake of the Lodha Committee reforms that said that India needed to have a 15-day gap between consecutive tournaments.
In this case, the consecutive tournaments are the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the World Cup. However, since the IPL 2019 finished on May 12, even a 15-day gap meant that India could go ahead with their original schedule of playing the Proteas on June 2. It needs to be noted that the initial IPL schedule had May 19 as the date of the final in which case, a 15-day hiatus would mean India could not begin its next assignment before June 3. But the IPL started early because of the recently-concluded general elections in India and hence June 5 continued to be the date for India’s opening fixture.
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