Cooch Behar Trophy postponed following ‘positive Covid-19 cases within the team environment’

BCCI to “continue to monitor the situation and identify a new window once the situation improves”

The BCCI has postponed the knockout rounds of the Coach Behar Trophy, the domestic Under-19 tournament, in the wake of “some positive covid-19 cases within the team environment”.

Till Monday, the BCCI had conducted 93 matches across 20 venues in the league phase of the tournament, and the knockouts were scheduled to be held across multiple venues in Pune. The board said in a media statement that it would “continue to monitor the situation and identify a new window once the situation improves”.

Hosts Maharashtra, along with Mumbai, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Vidarbha, Bengal and Haryana have qualified for the quarter-finals, which were set to start on Tuesday.

For the moment, there is no clarity on whether the BCCI would be able to find a suitable window to complete the Ranji Trophy. ESPNcricinfo understands that the board is looking at multiple options, one of them being the possibility of conducting the league phase of the tournament before the IPL.

At the time of writing this report, on Monday evening, the Indian government website put the number of active Covid-19 cases in the country at 723,619, a 2.03% rise from Sunday, with the total number of cases marked at 35,707,727.