BCCI President, Shashank Manohar, has said that the $41.97 million claim imposed by the previous BCCI administration on the WICB for abandoning the 2014 tour to India mid-way has been waived. West Indies, he said, will tour India in 2017 to complete the “unfinished” matches from the 2014 series.
WICB President, Whycliff ‘Dave’ Cameron
According to Manohar, the issue was “sorted out” when the WICB agreed to tour India to play the pending games. The decision was taken, he said, when the BCCI’s top officials spoke with the WICB late last year, before clearing India’s tour to the West Indies scheduled for this summer. This is the first time the BCCI has clarified its position on the matter.
“That is now sorted out because they are going to come back and play here next year,” Manohar told ESPNcricinfo. “They have to complete those [unfinished] games. That was a claim raised by the board. [We] would be satisfied by them coming and playing here.”
Manohar said the schedule will be finalised by the end of May. He said no other conditions were laid out by the BCCI during the talks with the West Indies board. WICB president Dave Cameron, without elaborating much, said: “We stand by what ever Mr Manohar says.”
In October 2014, when West Indies captain Dwayne Bravo led the players’ boycott, the team returned home after the fourth ODI against India in Dharamsala. The tour was meant to comprise five ODIs, one T20I and three Tests. Calling the abandonment a “monumental disaster”, the then BCCI administration slapped punitive damages on the WICB, and also suspended all bilateral tours between the two parties till the issue was resolved.
The first signal that the relationship between the two boards was on the mend came last December when Cameron issued a media release stating India would honour the commitment to play a four-Test series in the Caribbean in July-August 2016, as listed in the ICC’s Future Tours Programme. Cameron did not mention anything about the punitive claims, though.
Last month, Cameron sounded positive when asked about the BCCI’s claim. “We will do a joint media release for you as soon as both boards are ready,” Cameron had told ESPNcricinfo during an interview days before West Indies triumphed in the World T20.