India were due to play an ODI in Dhaka this week, and the tour has been put off again

India’s cricketers were meant to be in Dhaka this week. The Bangladesh Cricket Board’s calendar had three ODIs in the first week of September and three T20Is the week after, split between Dhaka and Chattogram. None of it is happening. The tour has been put back for a second time, and no new dates have been signed off by either board.

Announced in Dhaka, never in Mumbai

The trip was first pencilled in for August 2025. That schedule went out in April of that year: first ODI at the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium on 17 August, six matches across a fortnight in Mirpur and Chattogram, and a T20I leg that would have been the first bilateral series in that format Bangladesh had ever hosted against India. It was deferred in July 2025 and pushed a full year down the calendar.

The BCB put the new September dates into its 2026 home season when it published the calendar in January. The BCCI never publicly announced an itinerary to match. Eight months on, one board had a tour on its calendar that the other had never acknowledged in public.

The tell was an age-group tournament

Tamim Iqbal, the BCB president, called a press conference in Dhaka on 20 August to launch the Game Development Trophy, an age-group competition with every match at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium between 28 August and 9 September. That block sits directly on top of the ODI window. Asked about India, he said the two boards were still talking.

“Both boards remain in discussion about the India series. The dates may be shifted here or there,” he said, adding that the age-group event could be moved “if the India series is locked and fixed.”

It was never locked or fixed. The age-group matches started on schedule at Mirpur on 28 August, and the ODI dates came and went with no announcement from anyone. Tamim has since said there was no decision to call the tour off and that the intent on both sides remains positive. A BCCI source told ANI last week that the series is now likely to land in January, with discussions involving the Indian government still going on.

Delhi got the September window instead

India do have cricket in the first half of September. It is just not in Bangladesh. Afghanistan host them in three T20Is at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi on 13, 15 and 17 September, a home series for Afghanistan played on Indian soil, confirmed by the BCCI on 12 August. Back in July, when a Bangladesh tour still looked live, reports out of both boards had the Afghanistan matches as the ones that would be moved to make room. They were not.

After Delhi comes Japan. The Asian Games in Aichi and Nagoya run from 19 September to 4 October, with the men’s cricket from 24 September to 3 October at Korogi Athletic Park in Aichi prefecture and the women’s medal matches on 22 September. India defend gold in both. The men won theirs in Hangzhou without a ball bowled in the final, which was washed out and awarded on seeding.

Why the two boards stopped talking easily

The chill has a date on it. Kolkata Knight Riders bought Mustafizur Rahman for 9.20 crore rupees at the December mini-auction, the most any franchise had paid for a Bangladesh player. On 3 January the BCCI advised KKR to release him, citing recent developments in Bangladesh, and the franchise did.

Dhaka’s response was to ban the IPL. On 5 January the information ministry ordered an indefinite stop to the broadcast, saying no reason had been communicated for Mustafizur’s exclusion and that it had caused distress in Bangladesh. It was the first time the country had blocked the telecast of an international cricket tournament anywhere. The ban was lifted in late March by a new information minister who said politics and sport should be kept apart.

In between, the bigger casualty. The BCB asked the ICC to move Bangladesh’s T20 World Cup matches out of India to Sri Lanka on security grounds. The ICC board met on 21 January, reviewed the independent security assessments and upheld the schedule. Bangladesh withdrew from the tournament and Scotland took their place, so a World Cup went ahead without them for the first time since the competition began in 2007.

The waiting list keeps growing

Bangladesh’s women are in the same queue. Their white-ball tour of India, three ODIs and three T20Is scheduled for December 2025 in Kolkata and Cuttack, was postponed in November after the BCB received a letter from the BCCI. No new dates have been agreed for that one either.

Tamim, who took charge at the BCB with normalising the relationship as one of his stated aims, has kept the language warm and the calendar empty. January is the date being briefed now. It is the third window this tour has been given, and the first two both had schedules published against them.

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