No advancements have taken place regarding the rescheduling of IPL 2020, reveals a franchise owner

The Indian Premier League is one tournament for which the whole world waits quite patiently to take place each year. Interestingly, even the international cricket calendar keeps in mind the duration of the IPL so that players from several countries can join in. But the recent outbreak of the coronavirus has created a situation which probably no Indian cricket fan would have imagined.

After the prized tournament was suspended till April 15, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was supposed to take a call on when to reschedule the tournament but that didn’t happen. Recently, the franchise owners and the BCCI official had a conference call discussing the possible problem for the situation.

The fact that there have been till now 114 positive cases of coronavirus while two people have died out of the deadly virus. All this led the Government to stop allocating visas for foreign citizens till April 15. The decision has impacted the IPL as until this is taken off, there is no chance for the tournament to commence.

BCCI president Sourav Ganguly had suggested that the board could go ahead with a “truncated IPL” if required. The tournament was scheduled to begin on March 29 but the suspension till April 15 has made the tournament already lose 17 days. Though, Ganguly didn’t mention how the league will be shortened or how many matches will be lost or what will be the new format.

‘We have to wait and watch’: IPL franchise owner after discussions with BCCI

According to the sources, the conference call between the franchise owners and BCCI hasn’t yielded any result either. “Nothing concrete was discussed in today’s meeting (con-call). It was just a follow-up meeting. The situation has not changed in 48 hours, so talking about hosting the IPL is still pre-mature,” one of the IPL franchise owners said on Monday.

He further restated some things which were in fact shared by the BCCI officials. “We have to wait and watch. We will keep doing these con calls on a weekly basis to take stock of the situation,” he said.

Earlier, BCCI had informed that for it is taking a wait and watch approach regarding the situation. It is expected that the situations will get better by the month of April. BCCI had also said that having all the matches behind the closed door was an option. But the cancellation of visa for the foreign has now even started to make people think that the tournament could get cancelled entirely.