The newly-introduced Dhaka Premier League Twenty20 will be a permanent fixture in domestic calendar, announced Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) on Monday, reports Cricbuzz.
BCB launched the tournament this season, with Lt Sheikh Jamal Dhanmondi Club defeating Prime Doleshwar Sporting Club by 24 runs in the final at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium in the city.
According to the board, the entire initiative was taken as a part of promoting the shortest version of the game among the local cricketers. BCB wanted to make the T20 tournament a foundation ground for the Bangladesh Premier League, country's franchise-based T20 tournament, and provide more players for the national setup.
While BPL is dominated by foreign cricketers and major stars of the national unit, it has hardly been productive in terms of developing local cricketers as most of them are ignored by the franchises. As a result, Bangladesh have largely failed to produce quality T20 players in the last five years despite BPL's success.
Despite launching the DPL T20 tournament, there were doubts whether it would be able to attract the attention of the 12 clubs as they were often reluctant to play the tournament without the national players.
It was often observed that the Cricket Committee of Dhaka Metropolis were forced to change the dates of the DPL as per demands of the clubs, who in turn noted that they are not too keen to participate in the tournament without availability of national cricketers.
The trend seemed to have changed during the DPL T20 2018-19 as the club officials became more understanding regarding the availability of national cricketers.
''We were always told that without national players, we don't want to play 50-over matches in domestic cricket and the enthusiasm is even lesser for T20 cricket. We wanted to come out of it and we did,'' Nazmul Hasan, BCB's president, said.
''Whether the national players are available or not, we will organise this tournament every year and I firmly believe this will go on. This will happen along with the Premier League or even if there is no Premier League this tournament will still go on. We wanted to arrange such a tournament for a long time (to come).