Prime Bank pull out of BCL's first-class tournament

Prime Bank Cricket Club have pulled their franchise out of Bangladesh Cricket League's first-class tournament for the 2016-17 season, their general secretary Tanjil Chowdhury has said. He stated that the decision came in "protest" of unavailability of top players from their region, poor facilities and the tournament's lack of context in the domestic scene, and they had informed the BCB about it.

"Prime Bank Cricket Club has decided to pull out of the upcoming edition of Bangladesh Cricket League," Tanjil wrote in a Facebook post. "This may have surprised and upset our fans, wellwishers and cricket lovers. We would like to clarify that this decision was reached due to a culmination of few factors and issues, which we feel obliged to notify our stakeholders.

"PBCC feels that the spirit of alleviating domestic cricket standard especially the longer format is not aligned with the current editions of BCL which we have formally communicated to the BCB. We are deeply saddened by the circumstances that tantamounted (sic) to this critical decision, but at the same time feel that it was timely to do so as a matter of protest."

BCB CEO Nizamuddin Chowdhury said that they were aware of Prime Bank's issues but they would only decide on the matter once the BCB president Nazmul Hassan returns to the country.

"They (Prime Bank) have raised some issues and informed us. The BCB president is out of country and we will decide after he returns to the country," Nizamuddin said.

Tanjil further explained that the lack of star players in their South Zone franchise due to several reasons contributed to the pull out. "The presence of national team players in BCL is far and few, often getting missed out due to holiday, international duties and injuries or rest periods," he wrote. "That means we never got the full strength of our zonal team as on pen and paper.

"The youngsters [are] mostly inexperienced and few senior players miss out on the opportunity to play with national capped players.

"The standard of ground and quality/conditions of cricket in general is very poor. Starting with facilities and non cricketing season to name a few."

He mentioned that budgetary allocation was also limiting them from financing more than two teams' participation. Already their teams played in the Dhaka Premier League and last season's BCL, which spilled over to 2016. But Tanjil informed that they were pulling out only for this season.

"We have not retired our franchise, we merely declined to participate in upcoming edition citing the above mentioned reasons," he wrote.

The BCL was supposed to be held from September 20 but now that the Afghanistan ODIs have been scheduled from September 25, it has thrown the tournament into uncertainty as the BCL was being scheduled as a preparatory tournament for the England tour.