With only 12 days remaining to the scheduled start of the Bangabandhu Gold Cup, the Bangladesh Football Federation is yet to finalise anything, leaving the tournament somewhat uncertain. The BFF is still to name the fifth foreign team, who are expected to join hosts Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Bahrain Under-23 team in the tournament.A senior BFF official on Saturday said they are confident of starting the tournament on January 16 as planned but cannot provide any details until the Asian Football Confederation’s annual congress in Melbourne on January 9.
BFF secretary Abu Nayeem Shohag said it will be able to give a clear idea about the tournament once its president Kazi Salahuddin returns from Melbourne by attending the AFC congress.
Salahuddin is expected to meet the presidents of the participating countries during the AFC congress.
‘Hopefully we can finalise the participants after the meeting with respective officials of foreign teams during the AFC congress in Melbourne next week,’ Shohag said.
Sohag added that they have all but finalised the fifth team but cannot disclose it at the moment for technical reasons.
‘Just now I don’t want to disclose the name of the fifth foreign team, but I can confirm that the fifth foreign team will be from this sub-continent,’
Shohag also dropped a hint that the BFF might have to defer the tournament to four to five days from the scheduled date but wished to complete the tournament by January.
‘For some reasons, we might have to defer the starting date of the tournament,’ said the BFF secretary.
‘Bahrain requested us to defer the tournament for few days as their Under-23 team will be involved with other tournament at that time.’
‘But we want to complete this tournament by this month because we have to start our domestic season. The domestic season of Singapore will also begin from the first week of February,’ Shohag said.
With the tournament in mind, the National Sports Council has also started their renovation work of the stadiums last week.
NSC claimed that they need only few days to complete the all renovation works.
‘We set a target to complete all the works by January 14,’ NSC secretary Sibnath Roy told New Age on Saturday.
‘We will spend Tk one crore for the Sylhet stadium and Tk 31 lakh for the Bangbandhu Stadium,’
‘In Sylhet we will spend Tk 50 lakh for sanitation work and rest will need to repair the floodlights.’
‘Seven gates of the Sylhet stadium were severely damaged by the fans during the friendly match between Bangladesh U-23s and Nepal U-23s. We have to reconstruct those,’ Roy said.
The third edition of Bangabandhu Cup is scheduled to be held from January 16-27.
-With New Age input
