ICC Finalized Venues for 2011 World Cup

India to Host Pakistan's Eight World Cup Matches

Mumbai: The Central Organising Committee (COC) of the 2011 World Cup Tuesday recommended that India should host eight of the 14 cricket matches that were scheduled to take place in Pakistan.

The COC met in Mumbai to provide the ICC Board with a recommendation as to where, within Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, the 14 matches originally allocated to Pakistan should be staged.

Pakistan, which was removed as one of the host countries by the International Cricket Council (ICC) due to security situations, skipped the COC meeting.

The COC said that Sri Lanka will host the remaining four and Bangladesh two. India will now hosts 29 matches, Sri Lanka 12 and Bangladesh eight.

The COC recommendations will now be forwarded to the ICC Board for final approval. It was also decided that Mumbai will be the secretariat of the tournament. Ratnakar Shetty, Board of Control for Cricket in India's (BCCI) chief administrative officer, was appointed the tournament director.

"We had a good, productive meeting. There is much hard work to be done but we are confident we are now well on the way, with operational plans in place to become effective from the start of August. Moving forward, the COC will meet on a regular basis with everyone committed to a successful event, something we are confident we can achieve," Shetty said in a statement.

A total of 13 venues will be used for the tournament with eight of those in India, three in Sri Lanka and two in Bangladesh. All venues for matches will be announced in due course.

Bangladesh will now stage two of the four quarter-finals, and India and Sri Lanka one each. The two semi-finals will be staged in India and Sri Lanka, and the final in India.

The COC also recommended that a security directorate be formed under the chairmanship of BCCI president Shashank Manohar. It also said that a committee under the chairmanship of N.Srinivasan, the BCCI secretary, will take charge of the issues of inspecting venues and pitches. Preliminary inspections are likely to take place in October.