The ICC Women’s ODI World Cup 2025 will go ahead as planned — but not in Bengaluru. The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, once chosen to host India’s biggest matches, a semi-final, and potentially even the final, has officially lost all its fixtures. For a city that breathes cricket and a stadium that has defined it for generations, the exclusion is nothing short of devastating.
Chinnaswamy was supposed to be the heartbeat of the World Cup. Fans imagined India launching their campaign here against Sri Lanka on September 30th, imagined a semi-final under the floodlights, imagined the final roar echoing across the stadium. Instead, those nights will never come. The stadium stands silent, not because the fans failed it, but because the system did.
After the June 4 stampede during IPL celebrations, which claimed 11 lives, the police stepped in with a list of 17 sweeping demands: wider gates, repaired exits, baggage scanners, real-time crowd-flow tracking, permanent medical triage, ambulance corridors, fire audits, separate routes for women, children, players, and spectators — all within 15 days.
For a stadium that had already lost electricity for failing fire-safety compliance, the task was impossible. KSCA ideally will not be able to meet the deadline, and hence Bengaluru paid the price.
Bengaluru has never been a stranger to big matches. Chinnaswamy has hosted everything in women’s cricket— Tests (only Test in 1976), ODIs (most recently against South Africa in 2024), T20Is (most recently between South Africa and Sri Lanka in 2016), WPL blockbusters — and every time, the stands have been alive, the city buzzing.
Few venues in the country can match its legacy of crowd passion and its record as a proven draw for women’s cricket. Yet, when it mattered most, that legacy was pushed aside by bureaucratic hurdles and administrative lapses.
The fixtures now move to Navi Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium — a venue with its own history of women’s Tests, India–Australia T20Is, and WPL thrillers. It is a capable replacement, but for Bengaluru fans, no replacement could ever feel adequate. The Garden City had earned the right to host the biggest stage, only to see it snatched away.
For Bengaluru, this is not just about missing matches. It is about pride denied, passion overlooked, and a legacy ignored. The World Cup will carry on elsewhere, but the void at Chinnaswamy will be impossible to ignore.
(Inputs sourced from Times of India)
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