India are due in Dhaka on 28 August, and the BCB has booked Mirpur for something else
Bangladesh have filled their main stadium with an age-group tournament across exactly the fortnight India were meant to be there, and the BCCI still has not said a public word about the tour.
Aug 21, 2026
India are due to land in Dhaka on 28 August and start the tour on 1 September, according to the only schedule anyone has published. On Thursday the Bangladesh Cricket Board announced an age-group tournament that begins on 28 August, runs until 9 September, and has every one of its matches booked into the Shere Bangla National Stadium in Mirpur.
Those two things sit in the same fortnight, in the same city. One of them has a published schedule. The other still has not had a single public word of confirmation from the BCCI, seven months after Bangladesh put it in the calendar.
Tamim was asked the obvious question
At the Dhaka press conference where the Game Development Trophy was announced, BCB president Tamim Iqbal was asked whether the tournament meant India were not coming. He did not say no.
“Both boards remain in discussion about the India series,” Tamim said. “The dates may be shifted here or there. This tournament is being held in Mirpur but it can be shifted to the Basundhara ground in two minutes. If the India series is locked and fixed, we will schedule it accordingly.”
Read that again. The board hosting the series is saying it can clear its own venue at short notice, which is reassuring. In the same breath it is saying the dates of the series may move, which is not. A board with a confirmed international fixture eleven days away does not talk about shifting the dates. It talks about pitch preparation and broadcast slots.
The series has already been moved once
This tour was originally set for 17 to 31 August 2025. The two boards agreed to postpone it in July that year and pushed it back 13 months. The BCB put out the new dates on 2 January: three ODIs on 1, 3 and 6 September, three T20Is on 9, 12 and 13 September, with India scheduled to arrive on 28 August.
The BCCI has never publicly confirmed any of it. That silence has been the most consistent feature of this fixture since January, and it is why nobody in Dhaka has been willing to call the tour safe.
Why the two boards stopped talking
The freeze is easy enough to date, and it landed the day after Bangladesh published those September dates. On 3 January the BCCI instructed Kolkata Knight Riders to release Mustafizur Rahman from their IPL 2026 squad. KKR had paid 9.20 crore rupees for him at the auction against a base price of 2 crore, outbidding Chennai and Delhi to make him the most expensive Bangladeshi player in IPL history. BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia said only that the instruction followed “the recent developments which is going on all across”.
Bangladesh read that as a signal rather than a squad decision. Within days the BCB was asking the ICC to move its T20 World Cup matches out of India to Sri Lanka or another neutral venue, citing the safety of its players. The ICC declined to relocate the fixtures, the BCB held its position, the Bangladesh government did not clear the team to travel, and Bangladesh sat out a T20 World Cup that India co-hosted.
A full member missing a global event over a bilateral dispute is not a small thing. It left the two boards further apart than they have been in decades, and everything since has been an attempt to walk it back.
The thaw has come from a change of leadership. Tamim took over as BCB president and travelled to India earlier this month, reportedly visiting the BCCI’s Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. That trip is the reason anyone still thinks this tour might happen.
What has to happen now
India have not played bilateral cricket in Bangladesh since December 2022, when they took the Tests 2-0 and lost the ODIs 2-1. If the September series goes ahead it will be the first bilateral T20I series the two sides have played on Bangladeshi soil, which is a strange gap for two neighbours who run into each other at nearly every tournament.
The Indian calendar leaves little slack either. The Test squad is in Colombo until 27 August for the second Test against Sri Lanka. A different group of players would handle a white-ball tour, but the selection and the government clearances all have to land inside the same fortnight, and a tour that is not confirmed eleven days out is a tour whose logistics nobody has booked.
Tamim’s own framing was the giveaway. An age-group tournament that fills his main stadium for exactly the window India were meant to occupy looks like a board making its contingency plan in public. If the BCCI picks up the phone this week, Mirpur can be cleared in two minutes. If it does not, Bangladesh have already booked the ground.