Tamim calls the BCCI talks positive, but India’s September tour of Bangladesh is still unconfirmed
The BCB president says discussions with the BCCI have gone well and that Bangladesh is safe to visit, while admitting the decision is not his to make. Six white-ball matches are on the calendar from 1 September.
Jul 30, 2026
India are supposed to play six white-ball matches in Bangladesh starting on 1 September. With a month to go, nobody can say for certain whether the tour is happening, and the man doing most of the talking about it is the Bangladesh board president.
Tamim Iqbal told reporters this week that his conversations with the BCCI have gone well, that emails are going back and forth between the two boards, and that no decision has been reached. “The discussions I’ve had so far have been very positive discussions,” he said, before adding the part that matters more: no official confirmation exists yet.
What Tamim said
His pitch was about safety, which tells you what the sticking point is. “Bangladesh is an extremely safe country, and I am very hopeful that they will come,” Tamim said. “Whatever steps need to be taken from our side, we are trying.”
He was also honest about the limits of his own office. There are things beyond his control, he said, and Bangladesh should find out fairly soon whether the series is going ahead. That is a board president saying, in public, that this is not really a cricket decision.
A tour that has already been moved once
This series was originally set for August 2025. It was postponed in July that year by agreement between the two boards and pushed back a full 13 months. The BCB put the new dates into its home season calendar in January, and they have sat there since.
The schedule as it stands is three ODIs on 1, 3 and 6 September, followed by three T20Is on 9, 12 and 13 September. If it goes ahead it will be the first bilateral T20I series the two countries have played in Bangladesh, which is a small oddity given how often these sides meet at tournaments.
India have not toured Bangladesh since December 2022. That trip went well in one format and badly in the other: India took the two-match Test series 2-0, and Bangladesh won the ODIs 2-1 for their second home ODI series win over India in a row. No bilateral cricket has been played there between the two sides since.
The window is tight either way
India’s calendar leaves little room for a late change of plan. The two-Test tour of Sri Lanka runs from 15 to 19 August in Galle and 23 to 27 August at the SSC in Colombo, which means the red-ball squad finishes five days before the first ODI in Bangladesh is due to be bowled.
Different squads will handle the two assignments, but selection, travel and clearances all have to be settled in the same few weeks. A decision that arrives in late August is a decision that arrives too late to plan around.
For now the fixtures are on the calendar and the confirmation is not. Tamim is doing the only thing available to him, which is to say publicly and repeatedly that his country is ready to host. Whether India travel is being decided somewhere else.