New Zealand Cricket (NZC) says its team will not play its scheduled World Cup match in Kenya next month, claiming the security risk for players is too high.
NZC said after a day-long board meeting today that it did not believe the decision to play in the Kenyan capital Nairobi made by the International Cricket Council (ICC) on Thursday was reasonable. "The information received by the ICC Security Delegation to Kenya made it clear that there is a tangible terrorist threat in Nairobi and the board has seen nothing which changes that," NZ Cricket said in a statement.
Zimbabwe and Kenya retained their preliminary matches for the World Cup after a special ICC tele-conference on Thursday to discuss potential security fears. The ICC rejected a plea by New Zealand to switch their February 21 match against Kenya from Nairobi to South Africa, while no formal resolution was presented by England to shift their game against Zimbabwe away from Harare. NZC said it would now resolve the matter through "legal processes" but gave no details.
Six World Cup matches are scheduled for Zimbabwe and two in Nairobi. The remaining 46 games in the tournament, which starts in Cape Town on February 9, will take place in South Africa. The tournament has been plagued by doubts over plans to hold games in both Zimbabwe and Kenya, where security fears were heightened after a suicide bombing killed 16 people in an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan city of Mombasa in November.
Filed by James Boylan.
