The fate of England’s tour of Bangladesh, due to start on the last day of next month, is expected to be decided this week and to hinge on the assessment report by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s chief security officer, Reg Dickason.
Dickason flew back from Dhaka at the weekend after a fortnight’s inspection of India and Bangladesh, along with the ECB’s head of cricket operations, John Carr, and the chief executive of the Professional Cricketers Association, David Leatherdale.
The three-man delegation was given many assurances of security by the Bangladesh Cricket Board and the country’s home ministry ahead of the tour, which will consist of two Tests and three one-day internationals. The job of Dickason – a former Queensland policeman before he became Australian cricket’s head of security then England’s – is to judge how worthwhile those assurances are.
It is understood that Dickason’s chief concern is not so much the hotels where England will be staying in Dhaka and Chittagong, or the grounds in those two cities, as they can be cordoned off by the police and military.
The most potentially dangerous parts of a cricket tour are the journeys from the airport to the team hotel, and from the team hotel to the ground, especially in crowded Asian cities where it is humanly impossible to secure all the buildings overlooking the roads.
During the World Cup of 2011 the West Indies team bus was hit by stones in Dhaka in spite of assurances of security. The Bangladesh board president, Mustafa Kamal, said at the time: The teams were moving away from the ground to the hotel, and there were enough convoys.
‘The entire route was cordoned off by the police. Four or five stones came at one go from maybe five or six people standing far away from the main road.’ Or as the West Another consideration is not simply the safety of the players, or the media, who could be bussed around in the same convoy as the England team, but travelling supporters staying in cheaper hotels and far more exposed.