Cricket World Cup stadiums on track, but security is a concern
The 2011 edition of the Cricket World Cup will be played in http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Bangladesh-c747, and the tournament director, Ratnakar Shetty, has expressed his confidence that the stadiums for the tournament will be ready in time for the matches. The deadline for all the grounds to be fit to play a warm-up game is 31 December, 2010 and Shetty said that the stadiums were on course for the same.
He also added that the cricket boards of the three countries were working with respective governments in order to have a tournament which is "incident free".
There are many grounds in each of the three countries that are either being redeveloped or built from scratch. Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai is one of the grounds and it has already missed one of its deadlines which resulted in it refusing to host http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Mumbai-c820.
Earlier, even the ICC had expressed alarm over the nature of the facilities and the pitch at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. The other ground that had come under scrutiny was the Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, which the ICC had considered behind schedule.
There are two other new grounds that have been added to the list of international Sri Lankan grounds at Pallekele and Hambantota and an ICC delegation had deemed them to be on target for completion.
The other main issue that the tournament organisers could face is that of the security. http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Pakistan-c755 has already been removed from the list of hosts after the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked by extreme elements in that country. With regard to the security, Shetty added that all the three countries had full-time security consultants and the national and tournament security plans were being prepared.
The World Cup 2011 mascot was also named and launched. It is a baby elephant and has been named as Stumpy.
The Indian sub-continent has already hosted the World Cup twice, in 1987 and in 1996.
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