Bangladesh has been knocked out of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026. The International Cricket Council (ICC) has replaced Scotland as an alternative for Bangladesh. The decision was formally announced by the ICC at their official website on Saturday that Bangladesh will no longer compete in the upcoming ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.
The ICC gave the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) a 24-hour timeframe following a meeting on Wednesday. The team was asked to confirm whether it would participate in the tournament or not. With no reply to the call, the ICC followed its qualification guidelines and selected Scotland as the replacement team. Scotland has now replaced team Bangladesh in Group C, and has joined England, Italy, Nepal and the West Indies.
Scotland was the next-highest-ranked team in the T20 innings that couldnot get itself qualified for the T20 World Cup 2026. The team is currently ranked in 14th position.
Background behind the decision
The ICC conducted several meetings with the BCB over a period of more than three weeks and had multiple dialogues with the cricket board while listening to their concerns.
The cricket council listened to the concerns of the BCB, as the cricket board claimed that there were security threats to the team in India. BCB also requested to change the venue of all of their matches to be held in India, and put a condition on it by saying that we won’t participate otherwise.
Answering to this, the ICC reviewed the concerns cited by the BCB. Independent security assessments were conducted by internal and external experts. The ICC also shared detailed security and operational plans, outlining both federal and state-level arrangements, along with strengthened and progressively scaled security measures for the event.
The ICC concluded its investigation into the concerns raised by the BCB that there was no credible or verifiable security threat to the Bangladesh national team, officials or supporters in India. And gave the BCB 24 hours to reconsider their decision of not participating in the World Cup.
But Bangladesh did not change their decision and asked the ICC to rethink about changing their scheduled matches in India. After careful consideration of every possible solution, the ICC determined that it was not appropriate to amend the published event schedule. And today it has officially announced to replace the Bangladesh team with Scotland.
In a statement released by the ICC, the Board made the difficult decision that it was not feasible to meet the BCB’s requests so close to the tournament.
Also Read: ICC T20 World Cup: Bangladesh refuses to travel to India
