The Bangladesh Football Federation has yet to receive a positive response from seven of the eight Asian countries invited to participate in the Bangabandhu Gold Cup international football tournament.
Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand and Yemen were sent letters two weeks ago inviting them to the tournament, but only Nepal has confirmed its participation, said Abdus Salam Murshedi, senior vice-president of the BFF, after a regular executive committee meeting at the BFF House on Saturday.
The tournament is scheduled to be held at the Bangabandhu National Stadium in the last week of September.
Kuwait and Thailand proposed different tournament dates to the BFF, which has decided to send its president, Kazi Salahuddin, to those countries to convince them to participate in the tournament.
All the teams that have been invited, except Nepal and Pakistan, are ranked higher in the FIFA rankings than Bangladesh, so the Bangladesh national team would be unlikely to emerge victorious from the tournament, but the BFF is more concerned about raising the profile of the sport, having been unable to arrange an international tournament in five years since the current leadership took charge.
`We are going to arrange an international tournament after a long time. The result of the national team is not a big factor here. Our objective is to increase the popularity of football, so we invited some higher-ranked Asian teams,’ said Murshedi.
`The president is looking into the matter personally and after his visits to those countries we will finalise the kick-off date,’ he added.
This will be the second edition of the Bangabandhu Gold Cup, 14 years after the first edition was held.
The executive committee also discussed the football calendar for the upcoming season. The professional league committee sought the opinions of all the executive members about drawing up the domestic calendar using a different format.
The BFF announced that the executive committee will meet again eight days later to finalise the football calendar.
The BFF is also planning to increase the number of Bangladesh Premier League participants in order to increase the number of games played by each team, in accordance with FIFA and AFC guidelines.
At the same meeting, BFF member Eliyas Hossain was nominated as the team leader and manager for the upcoming SAFF Under-16 Football Championship, which is scheduled to start on July 20 in Nepal.
-With New Age input
