Sports Desk:

Comilla Victorians owner Nafisa Kamal on Friday took a swipe at the Bangladesh Cricket Board officials for not informing them about a franchise-less Bangladesh Premier League this year and expressed her shock regarding the decisions announced recently.

The BCB on Wednesday announced that they would run the forthcoming edition of BPL by itself without franchises, which are now out of a contract.

‘The process, through which we came to know that our franchise is not available this year, we have some reservation about it,’ Nafisa told reporters at her office.

‘We have some obligations to our fans and we want to play in the tournament, so we want the BCB to reconsider their decision,’ she said.

BCB president Nazmul Hasan told reporters that they decided to hold the BPL on their own after they failed to resolve the issues with the franchises, who, according to him, made some unreasonable demands.

The BPL governing council in August held meeting separately with all the franchises where they discussed several issues, including the possibility of revenue sharing before signing a new agreement after the end of the first cycle.

Nafisa said that the BCB was expected to provide them with a draft agreement by September 15.

‘The last decision in the meeting was that we would get a draft agreement by September 15 as they compiled our proposals and recommendations,’ she said.

‘We had some demands for the sake of cricket. We had three transparent demands, not for me, not for the franchise – only in the support of cricket.

‘The first one is revenue sharing. We are in a business agreement, this is a business model…revenue sharing is everywhere except in Bangladesh.

‘Second point is that there will be three foreign players for signing and local players will be up for grab in a fresh auction. If that happens it becomes biased for the local players.

‘Third point is, we wanted to remain stick with the draft, we did not want an auction. These are our demands and this is for good,’ she added.

Nafisa informed that they were taking all sort of preparations to take part in the forthcoming edition but the decision ended their hopes of becoming part of the event.

‘We knew that we would participate in the BPL as it is not possible to stay without BPL. If our demands were fulfilled, it would have been very useful for us…Our staff are already in the field and they have started their work,’ she said.

Nafisa claimed that abandoning the franchise-system BPL in this way would only hamper the reputation of the game as some of the cricketers are in dark about the future of the tournament.

‘Even today [Friday] Shahid Afridi called me. Some of the cricketers have abandoned other commitments to play in the BPL and now all of a sudden there is no place for us in the tournament,’ said Nafisa.