Brabourne set for return of cricket

The Brabourne Stadium at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in Mumbai will open its arms to international cricket after it was announced the venue will host five matches - including the final on November 5 - in the ICC Champions Trophy later this year. The Brabourne has not held Test cricket since the neighbouring Wankhede Stadium was built in 1974-75.

"It's a historic occasion, for which we had to wait for long. We have to thank the BCCI, specifically Sharad Pawar, and the ICC," Raj Singh Dungarpur, the CCI president, said. "We have hosted some nine one-day internationals in the past, like the Hero Cup match between South Africa and the West Indies [in 1993] made memorable by Jonty Rhodes's five stupendous catches. But a match of this magnitude [Champions Trophy fina] has never been held in CCI. It's not a turning of a page in history but a rewriting of a chapter."

On the pitch, Dungarpur, a former BCCI president, expected a suitable contest. "The ICC's pitch expert [Andy Atkinson] was here and said the wicket was a beauty," he said. "The other ICC officials who were here also said repeatedly that the CCI is an outstanding venue and very little [refurbishing] needs to be done."

The two biggest one-day finals in the subcontinent were the World Cup finals of 1987, at Kolkata's Eden Gardens, and 1996, at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. The Brabourne recently hosted England's first warm-up match of their tour of India and has staged other practice games in the recent past.