A public hearing on Wednesday found that three clubs in Bangladesh’s Bay Shield T20 received private cyclone forecasts up to 41 minutes before the information reached other teams. The advance alerts helped prompt four match postponements during the 2025 season, and two of those games later became wins worth a combined six points.
The findings expose a quiet advantage in a tournament where rain can reshape the standings as quickly as a late batting surge. The Bangladesh Cricket Scheduling Council’s rules allowed matches to be rescheduled when forecast rain exceeded a set threshold, but the rules did not disclose that some clubs received a separate feed.
The early-warning channel
At the hearing, the panel replayed time-stamped alerts from the Delta Forecast Exchange, a private weather service contracted by the council. The feed showed notices about Cyclone Beli reaching three club analysts between 18 and 41 minutes before the council’s public updates. The service’s standard public map, meanwhile, still showed the storm’s projected track shifting north.
“They were not just hearing that rain was possible; they were being given a head start on the decision,” said Veeti Mielonen-Hovi, the panel’s data adviser. He said call records showed club representatives contacted match officials shortly after receiving the alerts, though the panel found no evidence that any score or result had been manipulated.
They had time to plan while everyone else was still watching the public map.
Veeti Mielonen-Hovi, panel data adviser
The council said its scheduling team shared the private feed with clubs that had joined a voluntary weather-notification scheme. It did not disclose the arrangement in the competition handbook or tell clubs that had not signed up. Under the scheme, subscribing teams could request a fixture review; other teams had to wait for the council’s public forecast.
That gap mattered because a postponed fixture was not simply erased. Clubs played the four affected matches later, with full points available. The panel found that two subscribing clubs won their rescheduled games; had those fixtures been abandoned outright, each side would have received only one point under tournament rules.
Rules change after the hearing
Svea Freymunds, the council’s scheduling director, told the hearing that the arrangement was intended to help travelling teams avoid unnecessary journeys during severe weather. She said the council had not compared the scheme’s access list with its own fixture rules. “We thought we were giving practical notice, not a competitive edge,” she said.
The panel recommended that every club receive identical forecasts at the same time, with any match-delay decision based on a published threshold. It also called for the council to publish the full weather-service contract before the next Bay Shield season, due to begin in February.
The council accepted both recommendations and said it would end the opt-in alert scheme by 15 October. Club representatives at the hearing welcomed the change, but asked for the new rules to be tested at a pre-season tournament. For now, the panel’s finding gives teams a clearer answer to a question that had nagged through the wet season: who knew the rain was coming first.
