The event had already been postponed because of Covid-19 but has been scrapped now….
The 2021 U-17 Women’s World Cup, which was scheduled to be held in India, has been cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic, FIFA announced on Tuesday. It has also been decided that India will host the 2022 edition of the World Cup.
The tournament was supposed to be held in November 2020 initially, only for the pandemic to force a postponement. FIFA then revised the schedule and the tournament was to be held in February and March in 2021 in India.
India was appointed as the host by the FIFA Council meeting at Miami on 15 March 2019. But after a virtual FIFA Council meeting on Thursday which took stock of the pandemic situation, the governing body for the sport decided to scrap the event in its entirety.
Most of the qualifiers for the 2021 U17 Women’s World Cup also had not been completed and with the pandemic still continuing worldwide, it seemed highly unlikely that they would have been conducted in time for the tournament.
It must be noted that the CAF (Africa), CONCACAF (North and Central America) and CONMEBOL (South America) qualifiers had not been conducted while UEFA (Europe) cancelled their qualifiers outright last month, nominating Spain, England and Germany (as the highest-ranked teams) for the World Cup.
OFA also cancelled their qualifier and nominated New Zealand as their representative in the World Cup.
It will come as a disappointment for the U17 Women’s team who had been training for the event before the pandemic struck. This would have been the first time India took part in the event.
Five venues had been selected as host cities for the tournament – the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan (VYBK) in Kolkata, Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium in Guwahati, EKA Arena in Ahmedabad and the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai.
This development also will be a huge blow to each of these venues where development work had been going on in earnest for the tournament.
The I-League 2020-21 season which will start on January 9 in West Bengal earlier had not considered the Salt Lake Stadium as one of the venues due to the U17 Women’s World Cup preparations there. But now, Goal understands that the Salt Lake stadium will be utilised for the upcoming I-League season.
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