Cricket in SAF
Cricket is slated to make an entry into the South Asian Federation Games (SAF) which will be next staged in Dhaka, Bangladesh next year. The Dhaka SAF games will be held from January 29 to Feb 9. The games will host a Twenty20 cricket tournament but only players under 21 years of age will be eligible to play in the SAF games cricket.
South Asia is definitely the hub of the cricket world today, with at least four test nations located in the area - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. “India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal have already agreed to participate in cricket,” Kutubuddin Ahmed, secretary-general of the Bangladesh Olympic Association, told Reuters after a meeting in Kathmandu on Monday. (Reuters)
The success of IPL, ICL and the overall success of the shorter format of cricket in the form o Twenty20 has now made it feasible for it to be included in such games like the SAF. If the SAF experiment succeeds, Cricket can definitely make an attempt to be included in the Asian Games in the future, though an Olympics inclusion would seem too far-fetched at the moment.