Union Minister of Sports and Youth Affairs Kiren Rijiju on Saturday said that India will not host any international sporting event in the immediate future and fans should learn to live with the new normal of seeing sports being conducted in front of empty stadiums.
Rijiju’s statement should be viewed in the context of the suspended IPL, which the BCCI is mulling to organise in the October-November window in case the ICC T20 World Cup 2020 is pushed back.
“We have been working for quite some time now to resume sporting activities but before that we have to think about practice and training. We are not going to have a tournament kind of situation immediately,” Rijiju was quoted as saying by India Today.
“We have to learn to live with the situation where sporting events will have to be carried forward without spectators in stadiums and sports venues,” he added.
Talking specifically about the cash-rich IPL, Rijiju stated that it was the government’s decision to take a call on whether or not to conduct any sporting event in India.
“In India, the government has to take a call and it will take a call depending on the situation. We cannot put health at risk just because we want to have a sporting event.
“Our focus is fighting Covid-19 and at the same time we will have to work a mechanism to get back to normalcy. It is difficult to confirm dates but I am sure we will have some kind of sporting events this year,” he said.