Eoin Morgan poised to pull out of England’s tour to Bangladesh
Dhaka, Sept. 9 (NsNewsWire) –Eoin Morgan will pull out of the England tour to Bangladesh over the next 48 hours unless the prospect of losing the one-day captaincy changes his mind.
Morgan has revealed he has been too traumatised by his first-hand experiences of terrorism and violence in south Asia to go on the Bangladesh tour in normal circumstances, reports Telegraph.
A bomb blast in Bangalore in 2010, and the violence arising from a general election in Bangladesh when Morgan was playing in Dhaka, are the two experiences which have scarred him – and it will take a lot of persuasion from England’s director Andrew Strauss, including perhaps the unspoken threat of losing the captaincy forever, to make Morgan change his mind.
“I think ultimately, as an individual, you need to be comfortable within yourself to be able to focus on cricket,” Morgan said after England’s T20 defeat by Pakistan. “I have been to places before when things have become a distraction and once or twice when that has been security, and when it has been, I told myself I would not put myself in that situation again.
“Playing international cricket – or any cricket – is not about worrying about different things. It should be the best time of your life, it should be something that you are looking forward to, and wanting to do well in, and are able to focus on,” Morgan added.
“We played an IPL game in Bangalore and a bomb went off in the ground,” was how Morgan remembered the first incident. “We immediately left and went straight to the airport.”
Up to 15 people were injured when two low-intensity bombs went off in the Chinnaswamy stadium an hour before the start of the game between Royal Challengers Bangalore, for whom Morgan was a squad member, and Mumbai Indians.
The protocol was for any IPL game to be immediately abandoned after a terrorist incident, but organisers persuaded the players to play the match, after which the team bus – with Morgan in it – was stuck in traffic within view of the perimeter wall where the blasts had occurred.
“That was one instance,” Morgan said. “Another was Bangladesh, playing domestic cricket during political elections where things were incredibly violent.”
Morgan was referring to a short-term contract he had with the Dhaka Premier League side Gazi Tank in December 2013. He played five games for them and was man of the match in the league final.
Simultaneously, in the build-up to the general election in the following month of January 2014, Bangladesh was engulfed in civil disturbances as the opposition parties staged demonstrations against the government and boycotted the election.
These two incidents – the terrorist attack in India and violence in Bangladesh – have combined in Morgan’s mind to make him feel understandably “uncomfortable” about playing cricket again in Bangladesh, where the density of population makes any guarantee of security less definitive than elsewhere.