IPL 2021: BCCI never discussed shifting tournament to Mumbai, says treasurer Arun Dhumal

The 2021 season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) was postponed indefinitely by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Tuesday with multiple members of different teams testing positive for the COVID-19.

The first news of someone from inside the IPL bio-bubble contracting the coronavirus came on Monday when it was reported that Kolkata Knight Riders’ Varun Chakravarthy and Sandeep Warrier had tested positive for COVID-19. On the same day, news came out that three non-playing members of the Chennai Super Kings contingent including bowling coach L Balaji had contracted the virus.

As cases piled up, BCCI and IPL Governing Council (IPL GC) held an emergency meeting where it was unanimously decided to postpone IPL 2021 season with immediate effect.

BCCI treasurer Arun Dhumal has now, in an interview with Indian Express , has revealed what transpired in the emergency meeting.

“BCCI secretary (Jay Shah) was in touch with everyone, so was IPL chairman (Brijesh Patel). The secretary briefed us about the situation. He told us what was happening and what we can do now. He suggested that looking at the situation, it was better to postpone. Everyone agreed with the secretary’s view,” Dhumal told the Indian Express newspaper.

The COVID-19 cases within the IPL bio-bubble and the subsequent postponement led to some critical questions for the BCCI and IPL GC over their decision of hosting the tournament in multiple cities across India amid the health crisis. The 13th edition of IPL began on 9 April, on a day when India reported 1,45,382 fresh cases of COVID-19 infection.

The 2020 edition was successfully hosted in UAE (Dubai and Abu Dhabi) inside a bio-bubble despite the raging pandemic.

Dhumal said the decision to host IPL across multiple cities was taken after BCCI successfully hosted the home series against England in a bio-bubble across Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Pune. He added that BCCI would have held the tournament overseas if they knew the situation would get this worse.

Sever media houses also reported that BCCI also considered the possibility of shifting all the remaining matches to Mumbai in order to complete the season.

Dhumal termed the reports as baseless and said BCCI never considered moving the IPL to Mumbai.

“It was never discussed. I don’t know where that came from. Shifting the IPL back to Mumbai wasn’t viable or possible in such a short span of time. Setting up a new bubble takes around 14 days. Who can predict at this moment that a particular city is safer? Any city can see a spike at any point of time,” he said.