India‘s second one-day international with the West Indies has been switched from Indore to Visakhapatnam after a dispute over complimentary ticket allocations.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced the change of venue on Wednesday morning in a brief statement on its website.
It follows a dispute between the Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association (MPCA) and the BCCI over the number of tickets made available to officials from the governing body as well as sponsors and team officials.
The MPCA, which is responsible for the Holkar Stadium where the game was due to be staged, claimed the BCCI had asked for “about 1,300” complimentary tickets in the stadium’s pavilion block, but that the BCCI’s constitution caps the number available at 10 per cent of the block’s capacity, or around 720.
MPCA joint secretary Milind Kanmadikar told the Press Trust of India on Sunday: “The managing committee of MPCA has decided that it is not possible to organise the second ODI between India and West Indies in Indore if BCCI doesn’t back down from it’s demand of complimentary tickets.”
No resolution was possible and Wednesday’s BCCI statement read: “The second ODI to be played between India and West Indies will now be held at Visakhapatnam’s Dr. Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium.
“The match was originally scheduled to take place at Indore’s Holkar Cricket Stadium on 24th October 2018.”
An MPCA statement in response said that the delay in ruling on the issue would have risked “circumstantial difficulties for which the host association would have been unfairly held responsible”.
It added: “The unilateral, arbitrary, mysterious and leisurely decision-making and working of BCCI has caused such huge loss to the association and the local cricket fans of our state.”
