With the next season of IPL only months away, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is gearing up to finalise whether the IPL 2021 will have new teams and what will be new additions to the already participating 10 sides.
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According to reports, BCCI is going to select the two extra teams in its Annual General Meeting (AGM) scheduled to be held on December 24 and Ahmedabad is nearly confirmed to be one of the new additions. Some of the other cities in contention were Guwahati, Pune, Lucknow and Kanpur, but now it seems like Guwahati is out of the running.
Sports portal InsideSport spoke with a BCCI official who has confirmed that giving chance to Guwahati as a team in the IPL is not possible at this stage. Previously, it was reported that the Assam Cricket Association (ACA) desperately wanted an IPL team for Guwahati and ACA secretary, Devajit Lon Saikia had also confirmed to local media that they will be placing an official proposal for the team in the upcoming AGM.
The BCCI spokesperson said that the board is likely to include one or two cities for IPL 2021. While Ahmedabad is more or less a fixed addition, the possibility of Guwahati being one of the potential cities is “unlikely”. They added that teams “are not granted to any state associations” meaning the proposition done by ACA might not have much of an impact.
For now, it seems that the other city will be chosen from among Pune, Lucknow, or Kanpur. While nothing is confirmed yet, the new teams can be added in IPL 2022 as well, in case things do not work out in the 14th edition of the tournament. But, the report stated that no matter when the new teams get included in the Indian Premier League, Ahmedabad will be the first team to join.
The articles reported that both BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and Secretary Jay Shah are in favour of adding a number of teams in the highly successful cricket league.
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