After an agonising four-and-a-half-year wait, the heartbeat of Bangladeshi football finally returned to the terraces of the National Stadium last June, reports Daily Sun.
Yet, merely eight matches into its resurrection, the country's premier sporting arena already appears to be gasping for breath.
Despite a colossal renovation project budgeted at over Tk158.44 crore running from 2021 through to June 2025, there has been a staggering degree of negligence regarding the very soul of the stadium: the pitch itself.
The substandard turf, laid a mere 10 months ago at a cost of a million taka, is now being unceremoniously ripped up in its entirety.
Whispers of a turf replacement had been circulating since last August, but the true catalyst for action came on 16 March.
During a site inspection, the State Minister for Youth and Sports, Aminul Haque, did not mince his words, expressing fierce dissatisfaction at the pitch's deplorable condition.
His damning verdict finally jolted the relevant authorities into action, with the installation of fresh turf hastily commencing in the first week of April.
However, as the old grass was stripped away, an even more glaring structural flaw was laid bare: a spectacularly inadequate drainage system along the sidelines.
With the SAFF Championship looming large on the horizon in September, what began as a frantic cosmetic fix has rapidly evolved into a desperate bid to thoroughly modernise the drainage infrastructure flanking both touchlines.
Racing against the clock to have the pitch match-fit by the first week of August, the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) has enlisted Metaphor Sports to spearhead the Tk62 lakh overhaul.
Curiously, while the stadium falls under the jurisdiction of the National Sports Council, the BFF is footing the entire bill, as dictated by the terms of their tenancy agreement.
The excavation work has exposed some startling metrics regarding the stadium's efficiency.
While water drains from the center of the pitch in a brisk seven-and-a-half minutes, the sidelines take an excruciating one hour and seventeen minutes to clear.
This falls woefully short of FIFA's uncompromising mandate, which dictates that a pitch must be playable within 30 minutes of a torrential downpour.
To finally exorcise the spectre of chronic waterlogging, the drainage network hugging the touchlines is receiving a massive upgrade.
The previous system was frankly laughable—a meagre eight pipes on the left flank and five on the right.
This archaic setup is being superseded by forty-two new pipes, twenty-one distributed down each sideline.
The overhaul utilizes perforated pipes wrapped in state-of-the-art geotextile filters, which whisk subterranean water into main drains while blocking silt and sand, ensuring the system remains free from blockages and compliant with FIFA codes.
Bd-Pratidin English/ AM
