PCB to host Asia Cup in 2020 at home or abroad?

KARACHI: Pakistan will host the next edition of the Asia Cup in 2020 but the country is yet to decide whether the event will be held at home or abroad.The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has won the hosting rights for the continental extravaganza but doubts remain over the possibility of the event being played in Pakistan.

That’s because international teams have mostly stayed away from the country because of security fears. Then another big hurdle is the political issues with India, who are unlikely to travel to Pakistan to play the regional tournament. The Indians won the 2018 Asia Cup in the UAE where the tournament was played on the 50-over format. But the next edition of the Asia Cup to be hosted by Pakistan will revert to the Twenty20 format. It would be held in September, just a month before the Twenty20 World Cup takes place in Australia.It will be for the first time in almost ten that Pakistan will be hosting the Asia Cup.

Sources in the PCB told ‘The News’ on Thursday that the Board will make all out efforts to make sure that the Asia Cup is held on Pakistani soil. But much will depend in Pakistan-India relations which have been quite tense in recent years. In case, the tensions between the two nations don’t cool down then there is a big likelihood that the PCB will be forced to stage the Asia Cup in the UAE. That would mean the UAE would have hosted back-to-back Asia Cups, having held a 50-over version earlier this September.

This year’s tournament was supposed to be hosted by the BCCI, who opted to play it on neutral territory given that a Pakistan team traveling and playing in India would’ve been a complicated political issue. Ties between the two countries are at a low ebb, neither side having played a full bilateral series against the other in over a decade and India not having played in Pakistan since June 2008. Tensions remain between their boards too, most recently in the dismissal of the PCB claim that the BCCI “legally breached” an agreement to play bilateral series in 2014 and 2015.

The 2008 visit, incidentally, was also for the Asia Cup, and the last time Pakistan held a multi-nation competition. The PCB has not yet responded to queries about where the tournament is planning to be staged.

Since the Lahore terror attacks on the Sri Lankan team in 2009, international cricket has slowly returned to Pakistan. In the last year, Lahore has hosted T20Is against Sri Lanka and a World XI while West Indies played a series in Karachi in April this year. Added to are the staging of several high-profile PSL games in both cities over the last two seasons, with the involvement of foreign players. —with inputs from agencies